Tough Love and a Seam Ripper
by Desdemona Kakalose
Summary: How can you be someone when you have no one, when you have nothing? A sequel to the Devi the Homicidal Maniac AU: where does Johnny go after the hell house swallows itself? Wherever it is, at least there's soup here. If three people all share a little of their baggage, they can carry it more easily together than alone. (slow work up to a nny/mmy/edgar ot3)
1. Soft Spot: Lightning Rod

Crossposted; this is the less explicit version

* * *

[Soft Spot; Lightning Rod]

Edgar hears the crash even over the clamor of the crowd talking and scraping their spoons on ceramic. He winces, shoulders climbing towards his ears, and he holds up a finger. "Excuse me," he says, to the man in the wool beanie. "One moment."

The kitchen part of the soup kitchen is an absolute wreck. Edgar picks his way through the fallen stacks of pots to where his one and only employee is swearing and clutching his arm, hunched over, red faced. The grease-soaked dish towel on the floor lies there like a limp accuser. The oven door is wide open.

"You didn't use the mitts," Edgar says, drawing his own conclusions.

"No I didn't use the fucking mitts," Jimmy says, through his clenched teeth. "The towel's faster."

"Let me see that," Edgar says, peeling Jimmy's hand away from his forearm. It takes some effort. The skin is already red and puffing up into what is going to be a really horrible blister. Edgar lets him go and finishes pulling the pan of pork out of the oven, careful not to spill the grease that has already caused so much trouble. Once it's taken care of, he turns back to Jimmy, who is panting and staring up at the ceiling.

Outside the kitchen, there's a telltale rise in volume from the cafeteria that means a lot of people are waiting at the counter, milling around and grating on each other's nerves. Edgar knows from unrelenting experience that gathering a bunch of desperate men and women in a small space can be as dangerous as shoving a bunch of strange cats into a room together, and he's not eager to see what happens when it's left unattended for too long. It just seems heartless to leave Jimmy here like this, is all.

"Do you want to take a breather?" Edgar asks him. "The soup will wait."

"I got it," Jimmy manages.

"Are you sure?" Edgar says, "There's really no reason to push-"

And then he hears one particular voice high pitched and hysterical plowing right through all the others, growing in volume with each syllable. Edgar goes into panic mode.

In the time it takes him to get out of the back room, the man who insists on being called _Nny_ has already climbed up on the counter and started pacing, laces swinging from his untied boots, his long black coat whipping out behind him as he rants. His fingers, hacked off at the second knuckle, gesticulate at everything and nothing. The crowd is hooting and hollering, egging him on. Edgar catches something about _milk fat_ in the rant there somewhere.

Despairing for the cleanliness of his counters, Edgar sighs and calls up, "Nny, please come down from there!"

The man whips around. He cuts a pathetic if not uncanny figure, all bare angles and bulging insomniac eye, just the one, and the first time Edgar saw him it was actually quite a shock. In this line of work you see some hard up people, but there is a truly haunted quality to Nny's madness that struck Edgar to his core. No one else seems to know what he means, of course. Jimmy just calls him _Nubby_ , except that Edgar has threatened to dock his already meager pay if he pulls that shit again.

"Please," Edgar says.

Nny tilts his head, birdlike and uncomprehending, and then he hops right down, like nothing happened. He straightens his ragtag assortment of clothes, flicking wrinkles out of his coat. Unfortunately, they're both on the same side of the counter now.

"Why did you put all those pans on the floor?" Nny asks him, staring right past him and at the floor of the kitchen. Without waiting for an answer, he starts walking.

Nny started showing up at the soup kitchen about four months ago, looking like an absolute fright. Truly like something that had crawled starving out of a dumpster with half a mind to give up and die. He mumbled a lot back then, talking into his food and looking through people, going in circles and circles about a woman - the Artist, he said, although Edgar wasn't sure that such a person existed at all. Sometimes it sounded more like a recurring nightmare.

Maybe it's just Edgar's predilection for collecting strays, but he finds himself unfairly fond of Nny. He certainly wouldn't let any of the other patrons climb up on the counter like that.

He's right on Nny's heels, trying to reel him back out without actually _touching_ him, which never ends well, as Nny goes into the kitchen. Jimmy looks up from his swelling injury. The two of them blink owlishly at each other.

"Nubs," Jimmy says, "what's the deal?"

"Jimmy!" Edgar snaps.

"I told you I was gonna kill you if you called me that again," Nny says, calmly, and thrusts his whole arm into the drying rack full of silverware after the buried butcher knife. Edgar has to wrestle him out of it before he slices himself open, or worse, accidentally cuts off what's left of his phalanges.

Scruffing Nny by his coat collar like a cat-he hisses and wriggles like one too-Edgar points at Jimmy. "I'm going to forget I heard that," he says, "because you're in a lot of pain right now. Seriously, Jimmy, take a break."

"I'm fine," Jimmy says, visibly not fine. "The stew's gonna burn if somebody doesn't stir it."

Nny is seething in his grip. Edgar takes a gamble and lets him go, careful not to accidentally brush skin. "Nny, I don't suppose you could do me a favor, while you're back here?"

Immediately he perks up. "Sure, Edgar, anything for you."

Edgar tries not to look flattered and embarrassed by that, he knows that Nny's moods are as volatile as the weather. "If you can get hold of that spoon," he says, "could you stir for me?"

It isn't easy for him, but Nny wrestles the long spoon into his grip and that's that, once he's got his hands on something you'd be hard pressed to pry them back out. Edgar turns his attention back to Jimmy and drags him over to the well-stocked first aid kit. They have a lot of accidents here. A month ago Jimmy stormed out of the building in a huff and kicked the table on his way, which should have been fine because Edgar had long ago moved all the breakable stuff off that particular table (never doubt his ability to recognize a pattern), except that Jimmy missed the table leg and hit the cement wall. And broke his little toe. And then he'd come limping and shaking into work the next day because for all his many, many faults, he had a die hard work ethic (and no other income.)

While Edgar dabs on ointment and tries not to make things worse - he can feel Jimmy stiffen under his hands, trying not to flinch - Nny hums something that sounds like a sloppy memory of Claire De Lune. Jimmy sucks in a breath, head thumping back into the wall.

"So," the boy says, putting on an attempt at a casual voice, "what's new on the streets, Nny?"

Nny shrugs. "I fought a raccoon for a box," he says, nonchalant. "Scrappy little fucker."

"I thought you were squatting in that abandoned construction project," Jimmy says.

"Was I?" Nny says. The spoon pauses in his hands. "I guess I was."

"I keep telling you to get in with the homeless shelter," Edgar says, frowning. "It's dangerous out on these streets, lately. Do you have any idea how many people go missing in this city? And that's just the ones who get reported."

Nny lets out a laugh that has all the mirth of a hysterical episode, shaking his head. Chunks of unevenly cut hair flop over the bandage that runs around his head like a hemispherical marker. Privately, Edgar thinks an eyepatch would be less unnerving. The permanent white bandages stretched over the concave hollow of his eye give him a perpetually hospitalized look, as if he has just stumbled out of a locked ward.

"I hope she comes for me," Nny mutters, "just let her try."

Edgar and Jimmy share a glance.

For all that Jimmy is a rude bastard about it, anyone with working eyes could tell that he's taken a liking to Nny. Once Nny came at Jimmy with a ladle in the middle of a manic-paranoid episode and Jimmy just let him get his swing in, even though Edgar has seen Jimmy wriggle out of much tighter spots. While a lot of things set Jimmy off, such as certain sounds, weird looks from strangers, and the whole concept of sports, violence never seems to bother him. Sometimes Edgar wonders if it's not _because_ Nny is so unpredictably violent that Jimmy likes him.

"No one is coming for you," Edgar soothes, "I didn't mean to imply that you were in danger. It's just a scary world out there, Nny. That's all."

"Yeah," Jimmy says, "it's full of guys like me! You gotta watch yourself out there."

Edgar shakes his head. Sometimes he thinks that the parole board made Jimmy leave prison just to spite him. Of course Jimmy's parole officer - Mark, nice man, lovely wife - says that it all comes down to overcrowding, but there must have been other convicts they could have released who would have been more grateful for it. Jimmy, it often seems, took it like a personal insult.

The story, as Edgar understands it, is that sometime earlier last year, Jimmy shoplifted a zippo from the corner store and made the mistake of mouthing off to the officer on the scene, and that had been that. The arresting officer tried to pin a nearby manslaughter on him too, but the jury had laughed that one right out of court.

 _But I killed the guy,_ Jimmy always says at this point in the story, with his face screwed up in helpless bewilderment. _I killed a guy, I swear to god I did, the body was right there._

And at this point in the conversation, Edgar usually reaches out and pats him on the hand and says, _I know it seems like it was your fault, but everyone agrees it was just a slip. He shouldn't have been up on that ladder in the rain like that._

 _But I_ did _it,_ Jimmy always says.

Nny is back to stirring, his rhythm only a little jerky. It's amazing how difficult normal things are for him, things Edgar never would have thought twice about. Nobody knows exactly what happened to him, but it sounds like the woman - if there is a woman at all - took his fingers off just to see what would happen. It's frankly amazing they didn't collapse with gangrene a long time ago. And then, of course, sometime while he was in the middle of all that, they evicted him from his apartment. It's all been a wreck from there.

Turns out there's really not much you can do in this world without fingers.

Edgar tapes down the bandage pad over Jimmy's wrist, ignoring the way he flinches. Edgar comes from the school of tough love, just like his haphazardly catholic parents before him.

He's already been back here too long. There's still a crowd out front, still a pot of soup to be dispensed before six. The work waits for no man. Edgar stands up and brushes gauze wrappers off his apron, and he makes a decision.

"Nny," he says, "would you be willing to help Jimmy out for a minute here? Just while he catches his breath."

Nny looks over his shoulder-or he would do, if he had an eye left on that side. As it stands, he is staring Edgar with the mummy swath of empty eye socket, still stirring.

"Sure, Edgar," he says, "anything for you."

[x]

Edgar's story, if you could say he has one, isn't complicated. He's lived in the city for the better part of ten years, making as few waves as he can manage. His parents died before he turned twenty-one, not at the same time of course, and they left him enough for a couple of respectable if sparsely attended funerals, and then it was back to the grindstone.

Edgar Vargas is not stupid. Lots of people are stupid, and lots of people are ignorant and self absorbed which is not quite the same thing, but Edgar is not any of those things. For a few years Edgar worked a steady respectable job and went out for drinks with his coworkers on Friday nights, and was very careful never to say what he was thinking because he had seen how that worked out for other people over the years. People like Jimmy, who said what they thought whenever they thought it, people who picked up misery like a black jacket picks up cat hair, they started spinning their wheels and never stopped.

Now he works here. There's not a lot of time to do anything else, after all the hours it takes to just keep it afloat, but he likes to be busy anyway. He owns the kitchen, although it's a non-profit. Plus, what else is he going to do with his time? People are exhausting. He gets all he can handle of that from the patrons. It's fine. He's fine.

When Edgar closes up the serving counter for the night, crockpot balanced on his hip, he comes around the corner to find Nny still working at the station. Actually he almost has a heart attack when he sees the knife jutting out of Nny's hand like a horror movie monster, flashing in the light of the open refrigerator. Jimmy pops up from behind the fridge door and grins at him.

"Check it out," he says. "Multitool."

Edgar makes his way carefully over to Nny, who doesn't look up until Edgar clears his throat, and then he freezes. The knife is ductaped into his hand like a bad DIY project, undoubtedly Jimmy's doing. Did Nny actually let the boy touch him?

"Did you agree to this?" Edgar asks.

Nny looks down at his hand, following Edgar's gaze. He seems nonplussed as he lifts the blade away from the pink strips of chicken on the table and turns it over, inspecting it.

"This is how I killed her," he says. "The snake slain with its own fang."

Edgar nods slowly. "Okay," he says. "Can I take that off you now?"

Nny makes a disinterested noise of agreement. Edgar very carefully cuts off the tape, after spending a futile moment trying to unwrap it without hurting either of them. He doesn't really know whether Nny killed anyone. He's volatile, sure, but right now he's just scared and alone. After what he went through, whatever it was, anyone would be. Anyway, if a guy like Jimmy could get picked up for pocketing a zippo at the corner store, it's hard to imagine how a - dare he say - wacky looking guy like Nny could get away with cold blooded murder. It just doesn't add up.

"Thanks for all your help," Edgar says, wadding up the old tape. "If you want to take some of the old bread with you for your hard work, you can do that."

Nny flexes his hand. The twisted ends of his fingers have a brutal warped texture to them, like mottled wax. "Alright," he says. "But it's not because I'm hungry."

After he's gone, with the lights almost all off, Jimmy and Edgar work to wipe down the kitchen in the half light of the back window. The sounds of tin pans ring off the chipped porcelain sink. Jimmy drops his pan in a huff. "What," he says.

"Nothing," Edgar says.

"Bullshit." Jimmy leans his hip against the counter and crosses his arms, illegibly worn old tshirt wrinkling over his chest. "That's the Tense Silence of Disapproval, I can smell it a mile away. Get it over with."

Edgar sighs. "I just don't think you should have taped that thing to him is all. He's not a dog, you can't just dress him up in people clothes and laugh about it."

"Okay, fuck you if you think that's what I was doing."

"And furthermore," Edgar says, "you know as well as I do that Nny isn't… always as stable as some other people. He could have hurt you."

Jimmy gives a one armed shrug, flipping his wrist like he literally could not care less if he tried to. Edgar doesn't know how to respond to that lack of emotion. He frowns.

"Look," Jimmy says, pushing his flat mohawk out of his face with one sudsy hand. "Nny can't do _anything_. He can barely open a doorknob by himself. If he wants to hold a knife for a minute, I'm not gonna stand in his way."

"Taping it to his skin isn't exactly _not standing in his way._ "

"Details." Jimmy goes back to scrubbing, but there's something in the set of his shoulders that hasn't come untensed. "Just don't see what's so wrong with wanting to give a guy some autonomy."

Edgar's heart twists a little. He's not blind, he's seen the fits of rage that come over Nny when he struggles with something that should be simple-the howling furious misery, hard to witness, hard to look away from. He hadn't realized Jimmy was keeping track too.

"Is autonomy what you're giving him?"

Jimmy's pan rattles against the inside of the sink. "What do you care?" he says.

Edgar chews his lip. "I don't want to see either of you get hurt. I don't want you to put yourself in a position where you could get hurt."

"It's just some dicing!" Jimmy says. His shoulders work under his t-shirt as he bears down on cutlery. "It was just a one time thing, you're acting like I drew a big X on my stomach and told him to take out my appendix."

Edgar sets down what he was working on. "It's almost curfew," he says. "We should get you back to the halfway house."

"I'm not _done_ ," Jimmy says.

Edgar steps closer to him and puts a hand on his wrist, over the tape that holds his gauze in place. "It's okay," he says. "I'll clean up the rest in the morning."

Water drips from the tap. Jimmy lets the sponge drop with a wet _thwop_. "Do what you want," he says, and goes to dig his jacket out of the little office where they keep their paperwork and all the rest. Edgar slumps against the counter, wishing there was a conclusion to this conversation that didn't make him feel so uneasy.

What _is_ he afraid of? He isn't convinced that Nny has killed anyone before, but he's also not at all convinced that it _couldn't_ happen under the right circumstances. Nny lashes out, that's what he does, and if you happen to be standing too close you're liable to get splashed. There's nothing noble and quiet about his suffering. And Jimmy, well, who knows what Jimmy is thinking at the best of times.

The truth is, maybe Edgar is uneasy with the whole concept of these two men spending time together unsupervised. Maybe this whole thing with the knife is only the tip of the iceberg.

They load up in the car. It's silent. Jimmy complains like a child when Edgar tries to play his easy listening stuff, and Jimmy's music literally gives Edgar headaches, so now they just have to be content with keeping each other company. Most days, he actually enjoys it. Today it feels like chewing plaster. Edgar swings an arm over the back of the seat and pulls out, almost but not quite catching Jimmy's eye each time he turns to look out the back window.

"You know the guy I killed," Jimmy starts, chin in his hand as he stares out the window. His reflection mirrors back all his grey and black lines.

"Jimmy please," Edgar says, "that was an accident."

"I pushed him because he reminded me of my old man," Jimmy says. "I was passing by. I couldn't get my old man, so I settled for a guy who was nearby and convenient."

Edgar frowns. Jimmy's parole officer says that Mr. Euridge flew the coop before the parole board even set up their meeting. Apparently he was nothing to write home about, even when he was reachable.

"You ever get so mad," Jimmy says, "just, like, so goddamn mad- you don't care who you blow up on, you just gotta do something?"

Edgar shakes his head.

"I think Nny's a lot like me," Jimmy says, opening and closing his fingers absently, flashing black, chipped nails.

"Could be," Edgar says.

"Big world," Jimmy says. "Big ugly world. Little ugly people. Nothing worse than being powerless in a place like this."

The light changes. They roll forward into the cloudy evening, down the slumping side streets that lead to the halfway house, and a block down the other way, the crack house. Out of the frying pan, he supposes.

"Okay," Edgar says. "If you mean it, then - maybe you should work on a better solution than ductape."

Jimmy taps the doorframe. He must go through a gallon of nail polish trying to keep up with the wear and tear of scrubbing like that. Sometimes he wears eye makeup too, which Edgar finds charming if not incongruous with a kitchen setting.

"You still have those leathers?"

Edgar has to fight to keep his eyes on the road. "Do I still have _what?"_

"That time I was over at your house," Jimmy says. "You had this big box of fabric scraps. You still got 'em?"

Edgar knows his ears are going hot, and he also knows his hair isn't quite long enough to hide it. Jimmy has been inside his house exactly _once_ , showed up out of the blue way past curfew actually, and while that certainly was an _experience_ he has been very firm about maintaining boundaries since then. Like he said that night, Jimmy needed to focus on himself right now. There just wasn't any room for something like that with all the probation and the curfew and the hearings going on. Not that he wasn't flattered.

(Jimmy had looked awfully confused through the whole conversation, which was quite endearing, actually. No idea why he'd had that knife on him though. Edgar's neighborhood isn't _that_ bad.)

Edgar remembers shuffling him off with a poptart for the road and a promise not to tell Mark about this incident so long as it wasn't repeated, and he wonders when Jimmy had the time to look around his apartment in the middle of all that.

"I think so," Edgar says. "Why, do you want them?"

Jimmy nods. He is still looking at his hand, opening and closing it finger by finger.

[x]

Sometimes people (Mark the parole officer, for example) ask Edgar what it is that he sees in Jimmy Euridge. Certainly he could hire somebody less troublesome, even for the extremely low wage of a non-profit soup kitchen. It's true that Edgar has had to rearrange the kitchen so when Jimmy kicks the tables all the pots and pans won't tumble to the floor, and sometimes Jimmy tries to pick fights with the homeless, once getting as far as pulling his whole shirt off before Edgar could drag him away, but.

Okay, here's an example.

Jimmy subsists entirely off the mcdonalds dollar menu and the soup that he sneaks out of the soupturine at work. But instead of just being satisfied with his endless supply of free mediocre soup that Edgar never comments on, he seems to think he owes something for it. Edgar keeps finding suspiciously rumpled random ingredients lying around the kitchen and he _knows_ he didn't purchase them, which means Jimmy must have gotten his sticky fingers on them somehow.

And it keeps happening?

("Well… you didn't get caught again, I see."

"What do you take me for, an amatuer? Fuck off."

"You did already go to-"

"Shut up! I've got shit to make, get off my dick dude, damn.")

At the end of the day, Edgar figures you've just got to hate the sin and love the sinner.

[x]

Nobody bothers to ask Edgar what he sees in Nny. This is because Nny exists in an odd little snowglobe of his own madcap perception, far beyond the reach of sensible people like Jimmy's parole officer. There are very few sensible people in the world. Edgar probably knows most of them.

Nny isn't sensible, not even slightly, but there's something buried in the muddled mess that shines. Something sharp, or something rare. Whatever it is, it catches the light. The way he looks at the world, the things he sees, he must have been a real talent before his misfortune.

An example:

Last week Edgar came out of the kitchen just after dark to find Nny sitting on one of the dumpsters out back, watching the slow rotation of the night sky.

"The church killed men for suggesting that the sphere of heaven wasn't absolutely perfect," Nny said, as if they had already been conversing for a long time. "Then, of course, they invented telescopes. Now you can see every crack and crowsfoot on the moon if you like, with the simple application of glass!"

Edgar paused in the door, precarious stacks of boxes in his arms, and was struck by the shape of Nny against the sky, his rare wistful lucidity, his angles and edges for once rendered elegant.

"But from down here," Nny said, "it still looks perfect. At least there's one thing these flimsy rotting human bodies are good for, you know?"

[x]

What Edgar doesn't know is how Jimmy and Nny met.

Nny, for his part, barely remembers it. Jimmy just doesn't like to talk about those kinds of things. Out of all things in the world, what Jimmy despises most is softness - anything malleable, giving, weak. Now he works at a soup kitchen providing sustenance for the poor and grits his teeth every time Mark the Parole Officer points this out to him. All the softness of the world is a pebble stuck perpetually in his boot. It drives him absolutely crazy when people insist that his manslaughter charge must have been a very sad and traumatic event for him, and would he like to speak to someone about it? Sometimes he feels like he's really losing his mind. Once he tried to kill Edgar, actually, just to prove that he could. But that didn't turn out right either.

He saw Nny for the first time when he was taking in a delivery at the front of the kitchen, months ago. Edgar was back at the counter, swamped with hungry people, so it was up to Jimmy to get these damn potatoes off the stoop before some street kid dragged them away. Last year he would have been that street kid.

He was hoisting one of the heavier boxes up when he stumbled back into something with all the weight resistance of an old scarecrow. If scarecrows were made with bones and rags, that's what it would have been - he stumbled and swore and turned around to find himself facing a vision out of an acid trip nightmare. Nny scuttled back from the blow, dazed and curling into himself, face gaping wide open like a screaming mouth had opened where his eye should be. He'd been wrapped in rags that day, the ghost of what had probably once been a good outfit. He was dark from his wrists to his bandaged hands with something that looked like blood, so old it was mostly dust.

"Jesus fuck dude," Jimmy said, adjusting the delivery against his hip. "What happened to _you_?"

Nny cocked his head. Slowly, he started to uncurl, and despite the rags and the blood and the gaping eye, the look he gave Jimmy was the disinterested regal consideration of a prince. He lifted his stained mummy-wrapped hand, and in the hacked off violence of his fingers, Jimmy saw the flash of an equally crusty knife.

"Are you real?" Nny said.

"Man I wish I fuckin knew," Jimmy said, without thinking. Lately he wasn't sure of anything. He'd barely kept himself straight through the months of sympathetic gaslighting. He definitely killed that guy, right? _Right?_

The next thing he knew, the box of potatoes was upended on the concrete, and Nny had smashed him against the building with that gruesome crusty thing pressed against his windpipe, and the back of his head was screaming pain.

"Are you real?" Nny asked again, this time with his eyes wild, his teeth clicking as he spoke. "If you die, I can kill you. If I can kill you, you're real. She didn't die, I killed her and she didn't die, but I won't be fooled again!"

Jimmy couldn't look away from his hollow eye, perfectly empty like the concave doomed port of the death star. It looked like it had healed over from the inside, bloodless and waxy, and he didn't know fuck all about medical shit but something told him it wasn't supposed to go like that. He understood, instinctively, that something horrible and deliberate had happened here.

"Who did that to you?" he said.

Nny clawed at Jimmy's shirt, trying to get a fist full of it that he couldn't quite grip. "It swallowed up the stars it swallowed up everything and she died, she swallowed up the stars-" he breathed like he was having a panic attack, heaving against Jimmy's chest, and with each breath it was more and more like he was clinging to Jimmy instead of holding him captive. "No more stars," he said, "no more anything-"

Jimmy despises softness. Nothing has ever hurt him more than pity, not the sound of a beer bottle breaking over his head, not the hunger of a house left empty for weeks, not even the laughter of other children (how quickly they forget, how quickly they forget what takes a lifetime to unremember). Maybe it's because no one had ever looked to him for comfort before, maybe it's because even Nny's most pathetic moments are hard-edged, relentless and demanding - even broken and ruined he is dangerous, with his misery like a sword that cuts both ways - Jimmy reached for him. Jimmy pressed his hands to Nny's shoulders, almost an embrace but not _quite_ , and he opened himself up to that knife edge.

"Hey," he said, "deep breath. Can you feel me?"

"Yes," Nny gasped.

"Okay," Jimmy said. "Can you hear me? Good. Here, hand over my heart. Come on."

In the back of his mind, Jimmy knew that he was repeating half remembered lines from the movies that raised him in childhood, but that was all he knew how to do. It took a second of dumb scrambling, but Nny got his hand just about over Jimmy's heart. The polished wood handle of the knife pressed hard against rib, blocking most of Nny's touch. Jimmy made a little huffing impatient noise. No, that wasn't going to work.

"Your other hand," he said. "Put that one over my throat. Okay, perfect. You feel that?"

Nny nodded, absently, with his head tilted like he was listening for the sound of the heartbeat itself in the air. Against Jimmy's neck, Nny's own pulse was faint, his skin ice cold. In the wind that blew autumn through the tight hollow of the street, they stood suspended like that, a closed perfect unit.

There's lots of things Jimmy and Nny actually have in common. They're both still perpetually salty about the shit that happened to them in high school, for one thing. They're petty, broken people, and they're both, incidentally, murderers. They both really hate the word "helpmate" for some reason. But that day, all that Jimmy knew about Nny was that he was fragile. Fragile, and dangerous, and unlike anything else Jimmy had ever seen.

October was coming on. In his rag-bone body in his bone-rag clothes, Nny gave a hard little shiver, biting his teeth down on the chatter his jaw wanted to make. It was such a stubborn pointless thing to do, and Jimmy ached at the memory of doing the same thing too many times.

"Hang on," Jimmy said. "I saw a really cool coat in the lost and found box earlier. It's too small for me, but- you're a little fuckin thing-"

Edgar has this infuriating compulsion to rescue strays. Jimmy knows he is one of Edgar's many many strays, and he resents that, or he did resent that, but. As little as he wants to, after Nny, Jimmy thinks he kind of understands. It's just that Edgar wants to feed his strays, and Jimmy wants to sharpen their broken little claws.

[x]

Jimmy comes to work the next day with a prototype.

It closes around the wrist for security. Buckle and strap. Then there are the closed straps that go in the slight curve between the bottom knuckles and the thumb joint (he stayed up late in the night examining his own hands, imagining them even thinner than they are). He's already thinking of different kinds of loops he can add for specific kinds of tools, special handles he can make that will slot in there just right, but right now those are just pencil marks on a turned-over mcdonald's wrapper.

Sketching was a bitch last night, as a matter of fact. Every time his wrist tapped the table he thought he was going to bust the monster blister from the grease burn yesterday.

Edgar eyes the contraption on the counter, where Jimmy has slapped it down for his approval. That's the thing about Jimmy. No matter what a big game he tries to talk, at the end of the day he always holds his breath waiting for the final stoic nod (not that Edgar ever does the stoic nod, Edgar is warm and effusive with his praise when he has it, giving like it costs him nothing).

Edgar rubs his thumb over the buckle. "Is this going to fit him?"

Jimmy shrugs, playing it cool. "I can always cut it down," he says.

Edgar looks up. There's something in his expression that looks almost like pain, but soft. "This is great," he says. "I don't know what Nny will think, but I can tell you I'm very impressed."

Something inside of Jimmy folds like wet paper, and he sighs with relief. "Yeah well," he says, "I could do a lot better if I had decent tools to work with, the scissors they keep in the house are useless. I just about had to chew my way through the leather."

Edgar smiles, attentioned turned back onto the straps. "I'll pick you up some things from the Home Depot," he says, absently.

Jimmy's throat kind of goes tight. He'll have to find a way to shoplift something nice for the kitchen, if Edgar goes through with that. Jimmy isn't the kind of person who owes debts. He used to be superstitious about it, but now he's just hellbent on holding his ground.

"Do you think," Edgar starts. He frowns. He looks at Jimmy like he's confessing something treacherous. "Do you think it would be alright if we had Johnny do some work for us under the table? Just so he could have some pocket change. It seems like I never have enough hands, and you're always back here by yourself…"

Stuff like this is the reason Jimmy couldn't go through with it, the time and all the almost-times before that when he thought about killing Edgar. This nerdy little goody goody is always surprising him. Jimmy shows up in his house ready to cut his throat just to make a point, and Edgar very warmly escorts him out the back door without so much as dialing 911. And completely misunderstands what is happening.

In theory Edgar Vargas should be incidental to him, but in practice, it keeps coming back to this.

"No problem," Jimmy says. "I can show him the ropes."

It isn't until someone out front bangs hard on the window that Jimmy realizes they've just been standing here smiling at each other for a hot second. Edgar ducks his head down, fingers closing around the back of his neck nervously, and then he takes a step back.

"I'm sorry if I was hard on you yesterday," Edgar says. "There's always going to be- things- I can't understand. With both of you. But I want you to know that I'm always here, and I'm always ready to listen."

Jimmy's stomach rolls like every emotion he's ever felt is crashing down in him, it's an ugly mess that he can't begin to sort through. He stands perfectly still.

"I am," Edgar says, less certain, "here for you. You know that, right?"

Nny is someone that he instinctively understands, as if they were two monsters shaped from the same resentful clay. Edgar-he doesn't know _what_ Edgar is, and there are times when that really makes him mad. Then there are times when it makes him want to peel open his itchy beetle skin and show the last soft pumping valves where they lie buried.

Before he went to prison he was more like that. Open. Heart on his sleeve. But you can't survive like that, hoping for things that don't ever come, starving for scraps when the table is in your reach.

A moment of confused understanding bubbles up in him, in the middle of all his silent boiling nausea: that they are locked, the three of them, in a kind of strange triangle. Edgar wants to help Jimmy. Jimmy wants to help Nny. And Nny wants to help Edgar, for whatever goddamn reason. They are cycling their gifts around and around, skimming just a little off the top each time the love passes through their fingers, afraid to hold it for too long. Afraid of being burned.

Nny loved someone and for that he lost his fingers and his mind. Edgar never loved anyone, and for that he lived alone with his work in a miserable endless silence. Jimmy tried be loved, over and over, and for his crimes he was pushed off the docks into the water again and again until he finally went under.

Edgar's expression is starting to fall, the stupid hopeful half smile trickling away into embarrassment. He pulls his arms in against himself.

This shouldn't be Jimmy's decision. He doesn't know anything about people or about himself, he's never even paid a bill in his life. He's been good for nothing his whole life. Why should he pretend like he's not now?

"I'm not one of your charities," Jimmy says. "I don't want your fucking pity."

Edgar nods, fast, like he's relieved just to have the silence over. "Okay," he says.

Oh no. No no. What the goddamn fuck is his heart doing. He can't be responsible for these people. You do your own time, only _ever_ do your own time, he knows this. It doesn't matter that he's technically not in prison any more, everywhere's a prison of some kind. Edgar doesn't even know what he's asking.

But no one has ever wanted him before.

"There's some shit you aren't gonna want to hear," Jimmy says. His stomach flips. It isn't a _no,_ now, and he knows it. They both know it.

Someone is banging on the window insistently now, out front. The first aid kit lies on the table where they left it yesterday, some of the wrappers still caught underneath it. Edgar offers him his device, straps hanging looped from his fingers, and he says, "We can start small."

Maybe if they all do a little of each other's time, they'll break even at the end of the sentence.


	2. Young and Menace

[Young and a Menace]

(Before)

The soup kitchen in Crime Alley is open every day of the week, but it opens late on Sundays so that Edgar Vargas can stop in for mass in the morning. Consequently, on Saturday nights Edgar stays late to do prep for the next morning. For a year or so it's just been him, prepping in the evenings and running the counter in the day, and whatever church group felt like volunteering that week, which he's grateful for don't get him wrong, it's just that… sometimes you lose more time showing people how to do things than you would spend just doing them yourself.

But all that is changing! Edgar is just wrapping up the trial period with his first and only employee, who is a little rough around the edges but surprisingly reliable. He's going to sign the paperwork later this week, with the halfway house, and then he's going to get lunch with Mark the parole officer and talk over the fiddly details of employing a convicted felon.

It took him a while to come around to the idea of hiring someone. The kitchen is his, so he should be able to run it by himself, right? If he can't run it by himself, he might as well go back to working at the software company and make some decent money. But then Mark was at the bar talking about this kid he was having trouble with, one of the new paroles, and how this kid had been to four different job interviews and bombed them all, even though you really shouldn't be able to bomb a job interview set up through the penitentiary halfway house…

 _It's unreal_ , Mark told him, _he just seems to know exactly what to say to make things worse, every single time. Do you know he already tried to confess to a murder he didn't even commit? The detectives were livid when they realized they'd wasted weeks pinning cases on a serial confessor._

And Edgar had said, taking a thoughtful sip of beer, _Do you think he has any experience in a kitchen?_

Edgar arrives home at about 8 pm and sets his keys down on the table. He's got two hours to do laundry and make himself some dinner, and then if he's feeling _really_ restless maybe he'll pull out one of those magazines he keeps in the chest of drawers—he lives alone of course, but old habits die hard. There was a time when being careful with such things was absolutely imperative.

He flicks on the kitchen light. Someone freezes over his sink. In the second it takes him to realize it's _Jimmy,_ from _work_ , Jimmy has spun on him with a switchblade clenched tight in his hand, backed up against the edge of the sink like a beast at bay. Edgar blinks the lingering night-vision from his eyes.

Now, he's seen the paperwork, he knows a thing or two about what Jimmy is or isn't allowed to have. "Is that four inches?" he says, crossing his arms.

"Uh," Jimmy says.

"Give it here," Edgar says, and holds his hand open. After a moment of silence, Jimmy gives it to him.

"Really," Edgar says, closing it up and pocketing it. "My neighborhood isn't _that_ dangerous. You don't have to take risks like that. Look, I won't tell Mark if you won't, but you need to be more careful. It doesn't take much to end up back in custody."

Edgar looks up. On the counter behind Jimmy, there's the shattered bottom half of an unfamiliar bottle of wine.

"Oh," Edgar says, "you broke it…"

Jimmy hunches in on himself as Edgar leans past him and collects up the glass. Jimmy is motionless, except for the shallow breathing, and when Edgar leans past him their arms press together. He's a wispy thing, but livewire hot to the touch. Edgar pulls back, a little faster than he has to, and regards his visitor with an arm full of green glass.

"Well," he says. "Come on. Help me with this."

Jimmy trails after him, obligingly opening up the trashcan so Edgar can safely deposit the wreckage inside. He starts with the smaller pieces, and then as he's reaching for the jagged neck of the bottle, Jimmy snatches it up and points it at him.

Edgar tsks. "I _know_ you know knife safety," he says. He reaches past the glass and plucks it out of Jimmy's grip, then he turns it around in his own hand to demonstrates. "There," he says, "just like any other sharp object. You have to be mindful about where it's pointed."

Jimmy looks down at it, his own hand still hanging in front of him, half-closed.

Edgar checks his watch as he drops the last bit in the garbage. "You're out well past curfew," he says, "but I guess at this point you might as well be hanged for a murder as theft. I'm heating up lasagna, you want any?"

Slowly, Jimmy nods.

"Grab some plates," Edgar says. "Top cabinet, left side."

Jimmy goes about it quietly. It's the most quiet Edgar has ever seen him. It's actually very sweet, he's clearly nervous as hell. Normally when Edgar is in the same space as him for more than a minute he's already a couple paragraphs deep into either a self-aggrandizing monologue or a laundry list of complaints starting with his morning and ending with existence in general on the planet earth. Now he just lays out plates and sorts silverware like he can barely keep his mind on it.

Edgar's heart goes out to him. It's got to be hard—after all, it was hard enough for Edgar when he was that age, just being a regular guy in a petty spiteful world like theirs. Compound that with prison and parole and all the things in between, Edgar can't imagine trying to come out.

Edgar passes the second plate hot from the microwave to Jimmy, and they both lean against the counter, eating dinner standing up and trying not to scorch their fingers. It's quiet.

"Look," Edgar says, "I know why you came here."

Jimmy's fork makes a sharp shrill noise on his plate. He looks over. "…Yeah?"

Edgar nods. "You feel like you've got something to prove."

The look on Jimmy's face is almost guilty, an unhappy downturn of all his long features. It makes him look soft. Edgar shouldn't be so endeared by it.

"It's okay," Edgar says. "You're in a tough place."

Jimmy looks back at his empty plate. "It's—I feel like nobody is _seeing_ me, nobody is listening to me when I'm trying to tell them—I know who I am, you know?"

"I know," Edgar says. "And I'm flattered, for what it's worth."

"You _are_?" Jimmy says.

"But it doesn't really need to be me," Edgar says, with a self-depreciating little laugh. "I'm just convenient. I'm around."

"Uh," Jimmy says.

Edgar collects Jimmy's plate out of his hands and starts cleaning up, letting the tap water heat up as it runs. It's nice to have a guest in the house. If things were different—well, things _aren't_ different, but that doesn't stop him from wishing they could be. He's never really thought about it before, but now that he does, it's not bad. Even with the last of Jimmy's teenage acne lingering into adulthood, even with his gangly awkwardness, there's something about him that Edgar could definitely imagine rumpling a set of sheets.

He sighs. "There's just too much going on right now," he says. "You've got your probation to keep track of, and I can't in good conscience be responsible for you sneaking out after hours. Anyway, you work for me. That won't look good."

Jimmy lifts a finger. "What," he says, "are _you_ talking about?"

Edgar turns to him. He rests a hand against the juncture of Jimmy's shoulder, and that's a mistake because underneath his worn-soft t-shirt Edgar can feel every little bone, every little flinch his heartbeat makes, and it does flinch, and Edgar fights tooth and nail to keep his expression pleasant and vague.

"You need to focus on yourself right now," Edgar says. He is desperately trying to sound normal. Can he take his fingers back now? How long is too long. Has it already been too long.

Edgar snatches his fingers back and gives an awkward little laugh, and then he firmly steers Jimmy towards the door. They pass several of his perpetually unfinished crafting projects on the way out. Hopefully they pass too fast for Jimmy to notice them, because they do not look all that great.

"Just keep your nose clean," Edgar says, pushing Jimmy bodily towards the door. "There's lots of fish in the sea! Your time'll come soon enough!"

Jimmy wobbles to a stop just outside of the door, visibly bewildered and trying to catch his balance. Edgar leans out the door, one hand on the frame, and tugs Jimmy upright. "Take care of yourself," he says brightly, and slams the door closed.

A moment later, overcome with guilt, Edgar pulls the door back open. Jimmy is still standing there, staring at the place where the knocker was a moment before. Edgar rummages around sheepishly in his pockets.

"Here," he says, "one for the road."

He takes Jimmy's hand from his side and deposits a foil wrapped poptart in it.

"The wine was a nice touch," he says. He decides not to comment about the fact that Jimmy is not actually 21 yet, because he's been enough of a mother hen. He takes a step back.

Jimmy looks from the poptart back to Edgar. What a mess. It's a shame that by the time Jimmy gets his feet under him for real, he'll already have set his sights on someone else. Whoever it is, god knows it won't be worn out workaholic Edgar Vargas.

Edgar gives him a smile. "For what it's worth," he says. "Any boy will be lucky to have you."

Later that night, with the ancient washing machine rumbling behind him, Edgar flicks open the long knife that Jimmy was carrying. It's a good thing someone else didn't catch him with this. It's amazing how some people are constantly on the verge of disaster and don't even realize it.

[x]

Two people in the kitchen makes a world of difference. For the first time in what feels like years, Edgar is actually getting home at a reasonable hour, even factoring in the fact that he has to drop both of them off on the way before he can get there. Even the kitchen itself feels more alive, although that has at least a little to do with Nny's periodic catastrophic breakdowns. There are few things livelier than flying pots and pans. That's the price you pay, though.

The week after Nny finds that walkman in the garbage, there is a remarkable downturn in violent kitchen episodes. As far as Edgar can tell, what's happening is that when Nny is getting distressed instead of lashing out he is pulling on his headphones and… dissociating? It's hard to tell. He acts almost like he's in a dream when he's got them on.

It's better than the alternative, but it still makes Edgar worry. Whatever is going on in Nny's head, it's relentless. It's hurting him, anyone can see that.

After closing, while Jimmy is across the street smoking one of the cigarettes that Edgar absolutely doesn't know about and therefore cannot report to the halfway house, Edgar sits down next to Nny on the back steps. It's not a nice neighborhood, but for a few moments it's quiet out. The clouds are going lava-lamp-koolaid pink where the sunset touches them.

Nny is crying.

"Everything makes me think of her," he says, as the play button pops back up with a click, signaling the end of the tape. "It was pink like this when I picked her up. I remember her hair against the sky, so strange and dark, like some creature flung out of space."

"The artist?" Edgar asks. They never talk about her, not like this anyway—not like a real person. Despite the headphones and the pattern of the last week, Nny seems entirely grounded in his own body. Even grotesquely so.

"The color of the sky," Nny says. "The way a violin sounds. Every fucking ache that goes through me, the noise in my head, it's all Devi Devi Devi—"

He pulls his knees up to his chest like a child. His one eye is red around the rim, swollen. There is a faint speck of a water stain under his bandages.

"I can't get away from her," he says. "She said I wouldn't be able to and she was right, damn her dead eyes. There are times I still want to throw myself down at her feet and beg for forgiveness, even after everything, even now that I'm out. If I could open up my head and give her all of this rot, if she could just wipe me clean—"

Edgar leans back on his palms, giving Nny the courtesy of looking elsewhere.

"Are you thinking about going back to her?" Edgar asks.

Nny fiddles with what's left of his fingers, running waxy scars over the scant meat of his joints. While scars can heal over with increased sensitivity sometimes, Nny tells him that his are almost entirely numb. "I couldn't," he says. "I'm afraid."

Edgar lets out the breath he was holding. "What are you afraid of?"

Nny's fingers pause their absent worrying. "That she wouldn't have me back," he says. "That I've ruined it all. It's all I had, and now I have nothing."

Across the street, someone closes their window with a wooden _crack_. Edgar wishes he could reach out and take Nny's hand, but even if a lifetime of watching himself around other men hadn't already made him wary, he knows that Nny hangs onto his personal space like it's his last lifeline. Concrete grit scratches his fingertips instead.

"You _have_ something," Edgar says. He sets his jaw, afraid to watch what comes over the television screen of Nny's face. "You have me. You have us."

"What do you see in me?" Nny asks. "I'm not fishing for compliments or anything, I just don't understand. I want to understand."

"I don't know," Edgar says. "You make it sound like there's a formula to it."

Nny slumps. "You feel sorry for me," he says, with a quiet vitriol that startles Edgar. "You want to sew me back together. Who could blame you, I'm coming apart at the seams, aren't I? A little thread, a seam-ripper. Poke a few more holes. I won't notice the difference."

"That's not," Edgar says, "that's not what I meant."

Johnny turns on him, swooping in close enough that Edgar has to lean back to avoid being hit. "You fix a bird, you buy a cage," Johnny says, "you fix a bird and you buy a cage—do you want my life? Do you want my soul?"

Edgar's heart is going fast. They're precariously balanced, Nny falling forward and Edgar falling back, halted in this moment before the crash.

"Take it!" Nny says, "Take them! If you can rip me open and scrape me out, then do it! I can't fucking live like this!"

Edgar takes a risk. He presses his hands to either side of Nny's headphones, pressing just hard enough that he knows he can be felt. When Nny only breathes hard, lace-bone chest rising and falling under his oversized shirt, Edgar leans in and lets the smallest point of their foreheads come together. His skin touches linen wrapping.

"I can't fix you," Edgar says. "I won't try. I don't want your soul, I'm not a god or a devil and you're not a thing."

Nny shudders.

"You're a person," Edgar says. "I want you to be a person."

Edgar pulls back. He searches for some sign of understanding in the half of Nny's face that he can see, screwed up and wet and desolate. He _can't_ fix Nny, but it's not entirely true that he doesn't want to. If he could, he thinks he would—what a terrible power to have over another person, but Edgar is not incorruptible. He's seen this pain. He could be tempted with this.

"Maybe it's not much, it doesn't put food on the table or a bed under your back, but," Edgar says, "you can always be a person here."

Nny falls away, knees back up against his chest. He is watching the shifting light in the windows across the road, the glass going gold like molten metal. The sun slips through the gap above the soup kitchen, the shortest building on the street.

After a long moment, Edgar feels a soft scratch against his hand. Too afraid to look down and spoil the moment, he catalogues the every bump and scrape of Nny's woolen glove, cut off at the knuckles by someone else who needed the freedom, as it slides over the back of his hand. They both stare straight ahead, up at the windows, and try not to break this fragile human moment.

[x]

With the kitchen window propped open to let some of the oven-hot air boil off into the dying summer, Jimmy doesn't even pretend like he wasn't listening. Edgar sags against the dish pit and digs his thumbs into the skin under his eyes, like he's trying to work them free of his skull.

"I'll kill that bitch," Jimmy says, matter-of-factly.

"Please Jimmy," Edgar says. "That's not helpful."

Jimmy whacks the table with the blade of the knife he's using harder than he knows he should, for something as soft as fruit. "I'm not kidding," he says. "If I ever see her, I'll kill her."

"Okay well," Edgar says, "while you plot revenge fantasies, I'm going to go do something useful. I'll be back from the butcher's in twenty, try to have your stuff wrapped up."

Jimmy waves him off. The moment he's gone, Jimmy takes a big bite out of an apple on the counter. Before he started working here he'd really thought soup kitchens just made soup over and over forever, but it turns out they do other stuff too. Soup's just cheap, so they usually have soup.

The left hand piece of Nny's hand tool sits on the edge of the counter, forgotten, as Jimmy circles back around to the mincing.

He's already designed an apparatus to help Nny hold the kitchen knives. There's a secondary piece that goes around the left side, that he's supposed to use to get the knife in and out of the apparatus, but mostly Nny just moves the blades with his teeth. It's kind of amazing to watch him work. When he gets going he's just this machine of cutting edges, pearly and silver and flashing, fucking fearless. Actually it gets Jimmy a little hot, the way he spits his blades into the sink, the careless jerk of his chin as he curls his lips. The first time Jimmy saw it happen, Edgar actually had to reach out and push his jaw closed as he walked by.

Jimmy pauses in his work. He flips the knife over in his hand, watching the way it catches the light. On second thought, maybe he wouldn't kill the artist if he met her. Maybe he'd just hold her in place so Nny could rip her heart out once and for all.

If that gets him a little hot too, it doesn't matter; it's just a passing thought. It's not like he'd ever have the chance to try it out.

Jimmy spends his half hour lunch break across the road with the guys who do laundry at the motel a block over, perched on an old tire half buried in the vacant lot, smoking a cigarette he's definitely not supposed to have. The main reason he hangs out with these tools is that they'll let him bum a smoke sometimes, or at least trade something for it. Reminds him of prison. Kind of nostalgic.

"One of these days I'm gonna get that bitch," he says, "you see if I don't."

Chuey makes a face. "Sounds like he had it coming, if you ask me," he says. "If my girl tried that shit on me, I'd throw her out a window."

"Pow," Fish agrees, too strung out on whatever he's taken to get a full sentence out. "Straight to the moon."

Jimmy shoves his cigarette back into his teeth and smokes like a chimney, wishing he could just brain both of them right now. They didn't understand, a couple of fuckheads like these would never understand.

He knew what the artist did. She'd seen someone who was already fragile and fucked up and she'd taken him and twisted him without ever thinking twice. She'd built herself a temple out of his bones and left him barely enough flesh to crawl away. She'd taken him and owned him and used him up, and there wasn't a crime worse than that, not in the whole of human history.

"Yeah, sure," he says, "I mean, I wouldn't fuckin stand for it myself. Any bitch tried to pull that shit on me, I'd kill 'em. That's what I'm saying."

Fish and Chuey nod thoughtfully. Jimmy breathes out a sigh of relief, heavy and grey with smoke. The wind in the weeds is silent under the chatter of their city. A little brown flower shakes its spider corpse petals in the hollow of another tire.

[x]

They're up early. The January sunlight is barely breaking green over the city behind them, and the heater of Edgar's car coughs between them. "So," Edgar says, as they sit stalling in the dirt lot of the abandoned construction site. "What do you want to do to celebrate?"

Jimmy looks up from the whittling knife in his hand, perplexed. "To celebrate _what_?"

Edgar taps the steering wheel, eyeing the clock on the dash, and then turns off the car. "Your probation is up next month," he says. He counts off on his fingers, "Six months served jail time, one year probation, that's your petty theft and your resisting arrest all accounted for. You're a nearly free man, except for the whole criminal record thing."

Jimmy knows this, and yet, when Edgar says it the whole thing hits him like a a bat to the back of the head. He hasn't even started making arrangements. He keeps putting it off, like it's just gonna hang out there at a safe distance forever. It's not that he _likes_ having his every move monitored, living in a halfway house, having to have Edgar sign him out like a bad package that just keeps getting passed back and forth from desk to desk. He'd sure fucking like to go out and party or see people or just have a fucking smoke without the whole state breathing down his neck waiting for him to violate parole.

But also, where the fuck is he gonna go?

"I was thinking we could go out for dinner," Edgar says. "Somewhere nice. Not have to make our own food for once."

Edgar _sounds_ casual, but in the dark it's hard to tell what he's thinking, not that Jimmy ever fucking knows what that might be. Is Edgar asking him on a date or what? They really have not talked about this, about anything that comes after probation.

Edgar checks the dash again. "Where _is_ he?"

Instead of answering, Jimmy leans over him and slams his hand down on the horn. The dark morning explodes into sound. A beat, and then a figure comes tearing out of the bushes like the hounds of hell are after him, coat flapping out behind him. Nny hits the car and vaults right over it, like a stuntman, and instead of wasting time opening the door he straight up climbs in through the back seat's open window.

"You should drive," he says, barely even out of breath, as a rag tag mean looking bunch of bastards plow through the bushes after him. Without a second look, Edgar puts it in reverse and skids out of there. Jimmy grabs the roof above his seat and hangs on for dear life.

"Who did you upset?" Edgar says, as the car goes up on two wheels for a heartstopping second. Jimmy whoops, hand thumping the roof as they come rocking back down.

"You make it sound like _I'm_ at fault," Nny says sourly. He hasn't got hold of anything, he just bobs back and forth like one of those things that wobble but they don't fall down. "I'll have you know, all I did was suggest that hobo culture could benefit from getting in touch with its feelings."

"That doesn't sound so problematic," Edgar says.

"I also implied that those feelings might be a mask of cardboard machismo to disguise the fact that their mothers didn't love them enough as children."

Jimmy cackles in the passenger seat as Edgar says, "Jesus, Nny, you just had to bring mothers into it."

"It's all very heavy handed, the _I heart mommy_ tattoos and such," Nny says, sulking back into the leather. "I don't know who they think they're fooling."

"Nubs," Jimmy says, wiping away tears, "you're not gonna last another six months if you talk shit about every big baby with a beer gut."

Jimmy gets his hands up just in time to stop the garrote from closing on his throat. He can feel Nny's heel in the back of his chair as he wheezes against the piano wire. Well at least he's awake now.

Edgar reaches back and snaps his fingers in the air between them. "Seatbelt," he says.

The wire slinks away. Nny buckles himself in with a grumble and a click, and Jimmy takes a deep breath as he feels his throat for bruises. Yeah, that's gonna be visible in an hour. Why does anyone bother spending money on chokers when they could just have Nny choke them for free, honestly.

"I'm telling you," Edgar says, "you need to get into the homeless shelter. Jimmy's right, you can't survive like this forever."

"I refuse to be party to that institutionalized bigotry," Nny says, primly.

Edgar sighs. Even Jimmy has to admit that while it's fine to talk a big game, sometimes you gotta suck it up and take the ugly option. Principles are all well and good when you have money, but for the rest of them? It wasn't an option to begin with. Nny's bloody-minded idealism is going to fuck him sooner or later.

"You deserve better than this, Johnny," Edgar says. "Nobody ought to be alright with dying in a gutter somewhere."

[x]

It's cold out. Jimmy hunches into himself as he puffs away on one of Fish's joints, which he is _definitely_ not supposed to have but who is he to turn down a free go? Even if Fish's stuff is shit. This is a routine Jimmy could almost do in his sleep.

"Kick my buddy out of the goddamn store," he says, "They're gonna be sorry, I can tell you that much."

"Yeah," Fish says, "stuck up cunts. Just cause a guy don't have any fingers."

"Yeah," Jimmy says, "just cause a guy tried to break one claw machine open, fuck. Those things are rigged anyway."

"What was he trying to get to?" Fish says.

"Uh," Jimmy says. He tugs his the knot of his apron. "I dunno. Definitely not a cuddly bunny toy. Not anything like that." He readjusts his grip to keep from burning his fingers on the stub. "Anyway, I'm gonna fuck 'em up. As soon as I'm off probation, you can mark your calendar."

[x]

Days later, Jimmy is still thinking about where he's gonna go when he's free. Rent is unbelievable, he's asked around a little at the house and he's not liked what he's hearing. One thing he'll say for his old man, at least he kept the roof on. Not that he'd ever let you forget it.

His dad always said the second Jimmy hit eighteen he had better have a bag packed. Well, Jimmy didn't quite make it that far before he had to pack a bag after all, but it would have been a goddamn decent thing to do if his old man had stuck around long enough to show him how to write a fucking check. Or at least left a forwarding address.

Between pans of roasted potatoes, because there's always fucking potatoes isn't there, Jimmy uses the old gunky calculator in the office to calculate his income. He's got debts from prison, you know, bullshit stuff, and then there's food, and when you drop rent on top of all that he's not making _nearly_ enough money for even the shittiest bolt hole in the city. He tosses the calculator into the stack of bills with a thump and flutter. Maybe Nny will let him split his cardboard box in the alley.

Edgar comes into the back between servings, mail in hand. He's flipping through bills as he absently sidesteps Nny, who is sitting on the floor captivated by whatever's playing on his beat up walkman. He wiggles one envelope in the air.

"This one's for you," he says, holding it out to Jimmy. "Probably junk. Have you put any thought into where you want to go for your anniversary?"

"Dunno," Jimmy says, taking the envelope. "Just buy me a burger or whatever, it's not a big deal."

"Of course it's a big deal. We can go anywhere, really, it's no trouble. There's a steakhouse uptown where Mark takes his wife for their anniversaries…"

Jimmy gives him a look. He reaches into the soup pot and lifts the wood spoon, a drip of red broth clinging to its curve. "You hoping for dessert too?" he says, and he licks the edge of the spoon. It is extremely fucking hot. He drops the whole thing and slaps a hand over his mouth, eyes watering.

Nny wiggles a finger under the vinyl and pops off one of his earphones. "I'm not washing that," he says.

[x]

In the abandoned lot across the street, everything but the ugliest weeds are wilting. Winter started late this year, like it was biding its time in the wings, waiting for the worst possible moment to unleash its petty vengeance.

Jimmy forgets to tap the ash off the end of his cigarette again, and as a consequence, he's vainly trying to rub grey out of his black shirt when Chuey makes his suggestion.

"So you got like a week left, right?" he says.

"Sure, I guess," Jimmy says. He can't seem to keep his nails long with this job and he's not having any luck getting ash out of cotton.

"Homefree," Fish pipes up. He hasn't noticed that his nose is bleeding yet. Jimmy's betting once it reaches his lip he'll pick up on it.

"You're gonna need some cash," Chuey says.

Jimmy pauses with his collar stretched between his nails. The back of his neck goes hot with embarrassment. "What's that got to do with you?" he says.

Chuey puts up his hands. "Hey man," he says, "you ain't the first to come out the house broke. We could help each other out. Right, Fish?"

Fish is poking at his upper lip with his tongue.

"Right," Chuey says. He takes the cigarette from his ear and puts it back to his mouth. "You're always talking about the shit you're gonna pull once you're out. Well I got just the place to start."

Jimmy slowly leans forward, elbows in his lap. "You do, huh."

"These days you can't fuckin rob a bank anymore," Chuey says, "and gas stations? Forget it. Just look at you. But you know what nobody would ever see coming?"

Jimmy considers this for a moment. "A walk in clinic," he guesses.

"The fuck?" Chuey squints at him. "No man." He points his cigarette across the street, where past the broken chain link and the rusted gutted Ford, Edgar is standing at the door to the soup kitchen. With his hand on his apron and his apron tied around his hips, just looking at him makes Jimmy's brain hurt. When he tries to wave, Jimmy looks away.

"What?" Jimmy says.

"The _kitchen_ , dumbass," Chuey says.

"It's a soup kitchen," Jimmy says, "not a restaurant? It's not for profit?"

Chuey scoffs. "Like your boy Brokeback over there doesn't keep some cash around for groceries? Get on the ball man."

Jimmy jerks back, pulling his arms in against himself. "Fuck you, rob your own place!"

He doesn't know how much cash Edgar keeps around and he really doesn't care either, not as far as _Chuey_ is concerned. He's not gonna rip off _Edgar_. Not unless Edgar is in on it. At the back of his mind, he quietly files away "insurance scam" for later consideration.

"Hotel's got security and stuff, wouldn't work," Chuey says. He takes a drag, and then he adds, "Anyway, I'm not gonna rob the place where I work. I'd get fingered in a snap."

Jimmy stares at him. "But," he says.

Chuey waves him off. "Look, it doesn't gotta be the kitchen. If you're too chicken to break into the kitchen, there's at least three other places on the block I know how to get in and out of. Take your pick."

The antenna of the gutted Ford sways slightly as a breeze dips through the street. Jimmy shudders against the cold. If he had cash he could rent his own place. But he doesn't _want_ to rent his own place. If he had cash he could buy himself some decent boots. If he had cash he could buy his own cigarettes and of course these days he doesn't blow guys for cigarettes but it would be nice not to have to remind himself that every time he gets a craving. If he had cash he could get Edgar that damn electric kettle he's always mooning about.

"Sounds like you got this all figured out," Jimmy says. "What d'you need me for?"

Chuey cups a hand around his ear. "That sounds like you getting ready to wimp out on me, Euridge. Are you wimping out on me?"

" _No,_ " Jimmy says, automatically.

"You're not afraid of going back to prison are you?" Chuey says. The way he leans into it, the way his eyes get narrow, Jimmy would be stupid not to take it for the challenge it is.

Jimmy hides his mouth behind his hand, sucking on his cigarette. "They couldn't handle me the first time," he says, "I'm not afraid of shit."

"So what's the _problem?"_

Jimmy aggressively doesn't look in the direction of the kitchen, where a flash of something is trying to wave at him again. "Shit," he mumbles. "Ain't even got my feet under me yet."

"You're always talkin about how hard you are," Chuey says. "You should be thanking me. Couldn't ask for a smoother way to get back in the game."

Jimmy doesn't know how to tell him that he was never _in_ the game, he was just a broke-ass kid with nowhere to go and nothing to lose. It was a zippo. It was whim. He doesn't even know if he meant to kill that guy. He wasn't thinking about the ground when he pushed the ladder, he wasn't thinking about anything, he just heard the swearing and the pitch of the voice up above him and he was so _mad,_ he just got so mad-

Chuey jabs at him with the hot end of his smoke. "Are you hard or aren't you?" he says.

Jimmy shows his teeth. "You wanna test out a handful or something?"

Chuey knocks him on his ass before he even sees the fist coming. He goes over the side of the tire and hits the ground with a _whump_ , vision spinning, lungs in his throat. He coughs. Beside his head, Chuey puts out the fallen cigarette with a scuffed heel.

"Don't try that prison faggot shit on me," Chuey says. "I know what you are, buddy pal. Tell him what he is, Fish."

From out of sight, Fish's slightly watery voice says, "Punk ass bitch, my man."

Jimmy screws up his face. "Aw, Fish," he wheezes, "I thought we were friends."

He gets up, or he tries to anyway. He's barely got his elbow under him before Chuey stomps him back to the ground. Red spots spark behind his eyes. This is the part in the action movie when the hero swipes the mook's feet out from under them, and then he back-handsprings up to his feet and kicks ass, okay, but here's the thing. Even if Jimmy knew how to do a back-handspring, whatever that is, he's not sure he would be able to do it now. He's never known how to do anything but stay on the ground, once he's been put there.

"Chuey, come on dude," he says, "I didn't say I wasn't gonna help you."

"Yeah, I know you didn't," Chuey says. His heel is grinding what little air Jimmy's been able to suck in back out. "But I'm lookin at you down there, and I'm not seeing a good ending to this. You're gonna run back to your boy and snitch us out, I can smell it on you."

Jimmy grabs at his ankle, not that it does much good. The sky behind Chuey is clear and pale with the January afternoon, and it hurts to look into. God, him and his big fucking mouth. Guys like Chuey, guys like these? The next part of the script is unfortunately easy to predict. He hopes he doesn't lose any teeth. His face wasn't any great shakes to start with.

Jimmy fights the urge to grit his teeth-it'll only make this worse-and he keeps his hands at his side, nails scratching at the tiny fragile roots of grass. Flinching only ever makes it worse, sometimes you just have to… take your lumps…

There's just enough time for Fish to say, "Hey, hold it there a second-" before Chuey crashes to the ground in a flash of silver. Jimmy blinks up, air whooshing into his lungs, at the otherworldly specter of Nny. Slotted into the apparatus on his right hand is the meat tenderizer from the kitchen. The little studded tops glint bloody. He's standing straight for once, eye fixed on the ground beyond Jimmy, and he is as dark and strange against the sky as a vision from a nightmare ecstasy. He is some dark-coated god of the gallows, some black-eyed reaper man.

"Uh," Jimmy says, unable to look away from the bloody tines for more than a second each time, "Hey?"

"I don't think I killed him," Nny says. He switches his unblinking gaze from Chuey to Jimmy, and Jimmy's arms start to tremble underneath him.

"Probably not," Jimmy manages.

"Should I?"

Holy _fuck_ , mark him down for scared _and_ horny.

Nny whirls and points his tool at Fish, who Jimmy can just make out through the weeds. Fish's cigarette drops from between his stunned fingers. "Get your shitbag friend out of here," Nny says. "He's gonna stink up the neighborhood if he dies in our back yard."

Fish nods slowly, and then he stares at Chuey's groaning body for a long second before just grabbing him by the ankle and dragging him away. They can hear him wheezing for a good minute as he struggles with it.

"Your friends suck," Nny says, looking back down at Jimmy. Some of the Old Testament wrath is gone out of him now, but not all of it, not yet.

"Not my friends," Jimmy says.

"Oh, good," Nny says. "Even for you, that would be abysmal taste."

They look at each other for a moment. Nny still seems half like a visitation, a creature stepped down out of the ether to wreak havoc on the living. All at once, Jimmy feels really stupid for assuming this whole time that Nny needed his protection. Who the fuck could Jimmy protect him from? This man already killed his own demons once, and that's something god knows Jimmy never could do.

"Your break's up," Nny says. "It was over like five minutes ago."

Nny sticks out his hand. It takes a second for Jimmy to realize he's being offered a hand up. Unfortunately, it's the same hand with the meat tenderizer strapped to it. Nny follows his gaze, and then quickly switches hands with a sheepish little _whoops_.

Jimmy takes his hand. It's a strange fit, right to right, mostly palm. The straps of the apparatus cut into him. He hasn't touched Nny's bare skin, not since that first whirlwind meeting in the street a year ago. The air felt like this. His skin felt just like this. It makes Jimmy's head spin harder than hitting the ground did.

"Thanks," Jimmy says.

Nny pulls him up. He's surprisingly strong for such a ragdoll of a man, but Jimmy still does have to do most of the work digging in his heels and all.

"Don't mention it," Nny says, tucking his hands back into his coat pockets. All at once he is small again, hunched and skeletal, more ghost than god. He gives the cigarette smoking in the grass a damning look, and then he grinds it out. "I loathe men like that. All their wife-beating, self-congratulatory, stomp-the-little-guy bravado. Afraid to glance away from their dicks."

He looks up. He looks at Jimmy.

"You know what I mean," he says. "Don't you?"

Jimmy swallows, feeling the weight of every _big man_ monologue he's ever made weighing his chest like a grinding heel. Before Chuey there were hundreds of other men, a cavalcade of faces all in the shape of his father, whose Vegas-kaleidoscope features he's already begun to forget. Are you hard? _Are you hard?_ Two for flinching you pussy fuck, are you hard or aren't you?

"Yeah," he says, "me too."

[x]

Edgar claps his hands, showering the counter with flour. It's Saturday night, and they're supposed to be working until 8 to get prepped for the coming week, but what Edgar says is, "Alright, let's break for the night."

Jimmy glances up at the clock. It's not even six. They aren't even done thickening the stew.

Edgar hangs his apron up on the peg and starts pulling down the blinds, stacking up plates. Tonight it's just them, Nny is long gone to wherever it is he goes on Saturdays (probably the indie cinema in Old Town, they get even weirder people than him). Edgar digs a sports jacket out of the office and holds it out to Jimmy.

"What am I supposed to do with that?"

Edgar rolls his eyes. "Put it on," he says. "It'll make your jeans look less out of place."

Jimmy pulls it on. It's a little wide for him actually, but not so bad. "If you wanted to dress me up," he says, "you coulda picked something a little more interesting."

"We're going uptown," Edgar says. "You never told me where you wanted to go, so I made my own call."

Jimmy's first thought is actually that he still hasn't figured out how he's going to afford rent after next week, and he probably can't afford to miss two hours of work. But then again, free dinner. Decisions.

"Load up," Edgar says. He spins the key ring around on his finger, and for a second he really does seem like someone who has his act together. Jimmy never could resist confidence.

The ride uptown is weird. Edgar is actually playing music that doesn't totally suck, and the traffic is just starting to let up. The place Edgar picked is sort of fancy, although not like _Godfather_ velvet backroom fancy. They have a valet, but Edgar doesn't use him. They park a couple blocks away and walk.

It kind of feels like a date. Jimmy's never, actually, been on a date, but he thinks this is what they probably feel like. He fucked around a little in high school and—look the less said about prison right now probably the better, which isn't to say he won't talk about it if asked—he's seen plenty of movies, but this particular experience is a little beyond him. It's a little bit _Pretty Woman_.

"What if they think I'm like your call boy," Jimmy says, morbidly fascinated with the whole concept. Is he hot enough to be mistaken for a hooker?

Edgar actually laughs at him. "Like I have enough money for one of those," he says. He ducks under a line of old police tape and holds it up for Jimmy to follow. "Anyways, if I were hiring you to go on a date with me I'd take you somewhere a little less… public."

Jimmy misses a step and gets a mouth full of police ticker tape. It tastes like it's been out here for a week at least.

At the reception desk, Edgar says _Two for Vargas_ , and the hostess leads them back to a little table near the bar. Thank god the menu isn't in French, that's all Jimmy's got to say. Edgar chatters for a while about what's what, how it should be cooked, all that chef type stuff. Jimmy keeps catching people looking at him and he stares right back, hard, until they look away. That's right, fuck off.

This really does feel like a date. Aren't you supposed to ask people if they want to go on a date before taking them on a date? Not that he would bother if it were him, to be fair. He kind of tunes Edgar out for a while, cheek on his fist, watching Edgar's mouth move. If they're gonna get freaky at the end of this he is _all_ about it. He hadn't even thought about Edgar as a possibility until that weird attempted murder last year, but now he can't seem to go a day without thinking about it somehow. He bets Edgar has a great dick. He bets it isn't even cut.

While Edgar isn't looking, Jimmy swipes some saliva from the corner of his mouth.

"You still haven't told me," Edgar says, turning back from the waiter who is collecting up their menus. Jimmy quickly drops his hand. "Have you got a place lined up to live yet?"

Jimmy's mood drops like a television out a hotel window. "No," he says.

"Cutting it pretty close," Edgar says.

Jimmy takes a gulp of coke from his glass and coughs as it immediately tries to escape through his nose. "Expensive," he manages, eyes watering.

Edgar offers him his napkin. While Jimmy is coughing into it, Edgar says nothing.

Jimmy's heard stories about guys who get out of prison and have nowhere to go. He was almost one of those guys, thanks to his deadbeat dad, and now it seems like he could be all over again. It's not like he's never slept in an alley before, right, he knows how to take care of himself. It's just that before he always had somewhere to come back to, when the city got too ugly even for him.

"Do you think you want to keep working for me?" Edgar says, eventually, when the silence can't hold itself any longer.

Jimmy blinks at him. The idea of quitting hadn't even occurred to him. "Dunno where else I could go," he says.

"You could go a lot of places," Edgar says. "Granted, the criminal record is going to be a real albatross around your neck—"

"A what."

"—but I'll give you a good reference, and there's lots of programs geared towards released inmates, especially if you don't mind manual labor."

Although it's hard to keep it on his face, Jimmy grins. "You trying to get rid of me, Vargas?"

Edgar's eyebrows fly up to his hairline. "No!" he says. "Sorry, is that what it sounded like? I just don't want you to feel like you have to stick around if you don't want to. It's kind of a dead end job. I'm well aware of it."

Jimmy shrugs. "All jobs are dead end jobs, man."

"How philosophical of you."

By the time dinner comes, Jimmy has already forgotten what he ordered, so the monster ribeye is a pretty good surprise. It tastes different than he thought it would. Wetter. When they eat steak in cartoons it looks so chewy.

"I can tell you're new to this," Edgar observes. He hasn't even started eating, he's just watching Jimmy with horrified amusement. Jimmy slurps up the last chunk of meat. Edgar drops his face into his hand and just laughs quietly, shoulders shaking.

"See," Edgar says, once he calms down, "this is how they all know you're not an escort. An escort would have had a steak at some point before in their life."

"Fuck off," Jimmy says, licking his fingers. "I'm about to fucking deepthroat this t-bone, keep your classist shit to yourself."

"Oh my god I hope you're kidding."

Jimmy actually picks it up and runs his tongue along the edge, just to see the look on Edgar's face. The man goes absolutely red with laughter, ducking down into the table cloth to muffle it behind his hands. While he's down there Jimmy does go ahead and chew on it a little—waste not want not, he's getting Edgar's money's worth out of this event or he's gonna die trying.

Finally Edgar comes up, rocking back in his chair, fist pressed to his mouth. "God," he says, "I haven't laughed like that in years."

"You're like fifty I'm not surprised."

"I'm not even thirty," Edgar says, self-consciously brushing hair back over his ear. He's still smiling though.

Instead of just getting the check, Edgar points at some kind of cake on the little baby menu and gets them dessert. Jimmy sits forward over the table.

"You sure that's the kind of cake you want, Vargas?"

Edgar points his fork at Jimmy. "Don't get flirty with me," he says.

Jimmy kind of doesn't know what to say. He wasn't even sure Edgar _knew_ he was flirting. It's been stone walls all the way with him, ever since that first misunderstanding. As a matter of fact, he was starting to wonder what the fuck he was doing wrong that Edgar only notices him when Jimmy's trying to _kill_ him. Does he need to try that again? If that's what it takes, he knows where to find a garrote.

"Try and stop me," he says, and it only comes out a little raspy.

Their waiter sets down the cake between them, fancy motherfucker in a granny's china plate. The two of them stare at each other over the retreating hand, neither bothering to acknowledge the waiter. The chocolate has a smooth liquid shine. It's a staring contest, but Jimmy knows how to win one of those.

He lifts the cherry from the garnish and sucks whip-cream off the red curve of it, unblinking.

Slowly, Edgar crosses his legs under the table. "Well," he says. "That's hard to misinterpret."

Victorious, Jimmy takes a bite out of his cherry.

Thing is, Jimmy's blown some real tools in his time. There's a lot of dudes in prison so touch starved they'll do anything to get a little closer to another human being for a couple minutes, and the general consensus is that it isn't gay if you're the one fucking the throat. So, you know, he's been around a certain kind of block. He knows enough to know what he wants, at this point.

Edgar takes a dainty fork full of cake and eats it, avoiding eye contact. Small motions. Jimmy is very interested in the way he's absently licking frosting off his fork.

"I was, um," Edgar says, "going to—I'm suddenly not sure if this is—"

"Spit it out," Jimmy says. "Come on."

Edgar's bottom lip goes white where the tines of his fork are pressing in too hard. "Well now I'm afraid this is going to sound like I'm doing something underhanded."

"Be still my heart," Jimmy says, and gets himself some cake. He's not a big cake person, but it's free and all.

"I was just thinking," Edgar says. "Since you haven't got anywhere lined up to live, and since I drive you to work anyway—and it's cheaper to split a two person than it is to rent alone, and, well, I thought you might consider moving in with me."

Jimmy forgets to chew his food. "With _you?"_

"Close your mouth," Edgar says. "My lease is up this month and the owner says I could move into one of the two-bedrooms without having to file anything special. My rent was about to go up anyways."

Move in with _Edgar_.

Edgar tells him about the square footage and the layout and a bunch of other shit Jimmy isn't listening to. How thin are the walls, he wants to know. Will he be able to hear Edgar getting ready for work? Will he be able to hear Edgar wringing one out after a long day? What the fuck will they say to each other when they have to wake up and have breakfast in the same kitchen?

There's a bite of cake on Jimmy's fork, and he doesn't know how long it's been suspended there.

"So," Edgar says. He folds his napkin into tight little corners. "What do you think?"

The restaurant feels deathly quiet, stuffed with cotton and weirdly empty. Air sits like a solid lump in Jimmy's throat. Edgar looks up suddenly, hand bumping his glass just hard enough that it rattles, almost overturning it but not quite. "Oh," he tells the waiter, "thank you. Here, I have cash. No, I don't need change back."

[x]

The drive back is quiet. The lights of the city sweep by, green and unwelcoming and radiating their strangeness onto low hanging clouds.

Jimmy takes a night to think about it. He listens to Chico having a shouting match with one of the new guys right outside his door at three in the morning, which wouldn't have been late for him in the old days but now he's gotta get up for work at a reasonable time of morning so Edgar can pick him up for work and, really, if he slams the door open so hard that the new guy bolts for cover, he thinks he is justified. Chico just gives him an unimpressed look and wanders away.

Chico's pretty alright. He thinks. It's hard to tell, he's never stopped to interrogate the quality of people who are willing to put up with him. Does he want to spend the rest of his life trying to tell Chico's from Chuey's?

At the rosy ass crack of eight AM, Jimmy stands on the sidewalk outside the house with his hands in his pockets, already hungry but with nothing to do about it. Edgar pulls up, like he always does, right on the dot, and leans over the cabin to throw the passenger door open.

"Good morning," Edgar says, "did you catch where Nny is staying now? He's not still at that construction site is he?"

Jimmy slides in. He is hyper aware of every scent and texture, the ice cold squeak of leather and the smell of vanilla that everything Edgar owns seems to radiate, as if he himself is a walking bakery. Edgar insists that he can't smell it. It's probably an air freshener stuck under the seats somewhere, but then again, maybe not.

"Yeah," Jimmy says, "he's still there."

Edgar pulls away, merging aggressively into morning traffic. For someone who is so even keel most of the time, he's got a real tendency to swoop in and out of lanes in his search for a slightly faster route to wherever he's going.

"When he gets stabbed hanging around there, I don't know _what_ we're going to do," Edgar says. "There's some things even I can't tape up."

Edgar's got that little look on his face, the one he makes when he's joking but he's definitely not joking. It's so fucking ridiculous how Jimmy just wants to kiss him all the time. Embarrassing. But is that the Chuey voice talking, or is it him?

"Look, Edgar," Jimmy says. "About last night…"

Edgar startles a little, maybe at the fact that Jimmy called him by his first name. "It's fine," Edgar says, "don't worry about it. I shouldn't have sprung that on you."

"No," Jimmy says, "listen-"

"Anyways, you're just getting out of the world's worst shared housing situation, you're not going to want to room with another guy." Edgar swings around a corner with barely a token tap to the breaks.

"That's not actually-"

"Besides which," Edgar says, sounding a little more urgent as he plows through a yellow light, "it was inappropriate of me to offer given the timing of-"

Jimmy brings his hand down on the dashboard with a ringing hollow slap. The speed gage jumps and then falls again.

"I wanna move in with you," Jimmy says.

It's quiet. Edgar slows down for this next turn, almost gliding into it.

"You do?" he says.

"If you still want me," Jimmy says. "Or whatever."

"I do! I mean, as long as you want to. Don't make this decision on my account."

Edgar turns off onto the rock road that leads down to the construction site, rumbling through the loose stone. His old car rattles slightly at each pit in the drive. Jimmy swallows down his heart and tries to be cool.

"I do," he says. "I just got one condition."

Edgar glances at him. They come around the corner; ahead of them, the rotting plywood bones of the abandoned building spear up into the morning sky.

"Okay," he says. "What's your condition?"

Jimmy points through the windshield, past the layer of dust, past the overturned wheelbarrows, and straight at the figure high-tailing it out of the bushes.

"We're taking him with us," Jimmy says.

Together, they watch Nny take a flying leap off a concrete ramp and slide down a pile of powder asphalt, boots kicking up black clouds on either side of him. Edgar doesn't point out that the apartment is a two bedroom, or that it'll be weird with the three of them in one place, or that Nny's got no way to pay even part of the rent.

Actually, Edgar's ears go a little pink.

"Yes," he says. "Yes, we could do that…"

Nny hits the hood and doesn't even bother climbing inside. He thumps the windshield and he says " _Drive!"_ as Edgar reverses hard into the scrub on the side of the road. He scuttles up against the hood and clings on. His weight doesn't even make a ding in the metal.

Edgar throws it into forward and lurches out of there, bending himself into the doorframe to get a better view past Nny's legs. He gives the road behind them one last look out the rear view mirror, and he makes a sharp scoffing noise. "What in god's name did he say to them this time?"

They'll have to stop at some point to let Nny in the car, Jimmy guesses. Edgar will put his foot down. But for now, it's just three of them pulling this stupid awesome stunt, rumbling at inadvisable speeds towards a morning that has never seen anything like them.

Jimmy reaches into the glovebox and pulls out one of the breakfast bars that Edgar keeps there for some reason, even though he never ever eats them. They're always restocked too. On the roof, Nny kicks his heels against the glass and laughs.

There's a future in here somewhere. He can feel it.


	3. Somewhere in the Distance

[Somewhere in the Distance]

It cost extra. To move into the new apartment the week before his old lease was technically up, it cost a little extra. He didn't mention this to Jimmy, who for the last five days had been sleeping on his couch a free and technically homeless man. They had stood on the doorstep of the halfway house the day that Edgar came to pick him up for the last time, overwhelmed by the sound of the street and the smell of exhaust and the smallness of Jimmy's luggage. The world had seemed so strange. Even Jimmy had been subdued, as he turned back from shouting obscenities at another young man hanging out the window.

All of Jimmy's worldly possessions fit into one suitcase and a duffle bag. Because it was temporary, Edgar didn't mind the clothing strewn across the living room in a several foot radius around the sleeper sofa, but he did mind the way for three mornings now he had come out of his bedroom to make coffee and found a foreign body heavy in the darkness, a shadow drifting among shadows, fist tucked under his sleeping cheek. This morning, he had come out to find Jimmy already awake, halfway through the motion of pulling a t-shirt over his head, all his rangy muscles and bare ribs exposed to the morning light.

Edgar had held his breath in the doorway, until the moment passed, and then made a lot more noise than necessary as he came out into the open. The early moving fee was worth it. Once they were carefully compartmentalized into separate bedrooms, all of this uneasy intimacy would vanish like steam in the air.

A year since the first time Jimmy stood in this apartment, with his clumsy attempt at making a point. Edgar was still saying goodbye to the sentimental fantasy of being the one who got to share in Jimmy's newfound liberation. God only knew there were more exciting men in the world, closer to Jimmy's own age, and ones who didn't control his work schedule for that matter. In any case, they were about to make a kind of home together- surely that was enough.

There was no world in which Edgar Vargas, nonprofit entrepreneur, had enough money for a moving truck, but the new apartment was just across the complex. He took the day off. Remarkable luxury. They drank coffee in silence, Jimmy blearily accepting the offered cup as he passed by the kitchen door. He drank it with sugar and no cream, the opposite of Edgar who poured half the bottle of milk into a pot of coffee and called it a day. At their backs, through the window, the sun poked its fingers through the city skyline. Two things Edgar was giving up in the move: a full sized kitchen, and a ground level porch. He'd made his peace with it.

As Jimmy reached past him and dragged the whole sugar bowl back to himself, he said, "So how're we doing this thing?"

Edgar contemplated what remained of his living room, stacked and ordered neatly in a series of cardboard boxes. "Furniture first," he decided. "Then the boxes. Hardest to least hard."

Jimmy sipped his coffee, unsubtly showing off his bicep, the sleeve of his T-shirt rolled up high above it. "No sweat," he said, "I got this."

Edgar lifted an eyebrow but didn't actually say anything. As far as he could tell, Jimmy had actually been more built when he first came out of prison. Other than the usual lifting and carrying that went into running a restaurant, Edgar suspected the kid hadn't worked out since he set foot on free soil. Still, it wasn't a bad view. If you were into that sort of thing, of course.

It was one of those early southern california spring days, before the weather had finished working out the kinks in its routine. They started with the bed. It was a simple box on a rolling frame, and they took it apart without any trouble. The boxspring wouldn't fit in Edgar's little car, so after a few minutes of standing in the parking lot staring at the vehicle, they put the frame back together and rolled the whole thing across the complex like a pull wagon. That was the easy part. Getting it up the stairs to the second floor of the new building was the hard part.

Jimmy's rolled up sleeves lasted maybe half an hour, and then he pulled the whole thing off, discarding it on the hood of the car like forgotten paper wrapping. Edgar watched his back as he reached and lifted, the muscles working under the skin, the taper of his back down to that narrow waist. There were black words scrolling across the nape of that neck, Edgar saw for the first time, but as he was leaning in to try and get a good look, Jimmy turned his head and—their eyes met—his lips split wide over his teeth—and Edgar looked hastily away.

Everything was dusty and hot in the morning sun, a clear sky like a blue dome above them. What they couldn't fit in the car, which was most things, they hefted between them and carried down the sidewalk. A cheerful woman on the third floor of building D wolf whistled at them. Jimmy flipped her a mock salute, bookshelf balanced against his hip. Edgar hid his face in the plywood.

For the whole week up until the move, Jimmy had been a keyed up wreck. He'd moved through the kitchen at work like a caffeine junkie jittering through his fourth cup of coffee. He hadn't taken a smoke break in at least a week, which was probably part of the problem, but when Edgar had suggested he take a fifteen minute Jimmy acted like he'd suggested they all play Russian Roulette with a loaded gun. Edgar wondered if he'd quit smoking. It would be a definite improvement on his health. But in any case, today all that nervous energy seemed to have melted right off- there was nothing but smooth, cocky easiness in Jimmy's bearing.

It was a fair walk back, and it felt longer each time. As they passed building D again, now apparently vacant, Edgar tugged at the collar of his own shirt. If he pulled his off too, would that look like it meant something?

For a moment, as they came up over the hill, Edgar mistook the black spot on the hood of his car for a trash bag full of belongings, slumped forward on itself. But when the spot turned its face to them, Edgar belatedly recognized it as Nny with yet another oversized jacket thrown over himself.

Edgar jogged forward, waving. "Aren't you hot?" he called out.

Nny squinted at him, and then glanced up at the sky. He'd peeled off his bandages again, the whole strange concave inside of his skull bare to the sunshine. Edgar'd finally gotten used to seeing that, except for the part where when the light hits it just like this, when he can see the veins inside the socket all red and angry. He winced.

"I'll help you move," Nny said, looking back down at him. "You are moving today, aren't you?"

"Oh," Edgar said, as Jimmy came up behind him and also said, "You sure about that?"

Nny scowled at them. "You said you wanted me to stay with you," he said. "Did you not want me to stay with you?"

Edgar looked from the bone thin edges of Nny's exposed shoulders, where his jackets were sliding down his arm, to his ruined fingers. "No," Edgar said, weakly, "we definitely want you to stay. It's just. Are you sure you should be lifting things for extended periods of time?"

Nny waved him off with a flick of his hand, hopping down from the hood of the car in a rumple of clothing. He wore two jackets and several necklaces, one of which appeared to be made of sparkly gel beads and another which looked like antique silver glued back together at the clasp. Edgar didn't know how to broach the topic of Nny not needing to wear all of his worldly possessions at the same time now that he was not technically homeless anymore, not without offending him somehow. He just watched them all clink together in a twisted mass, helplessly.

Jimmy hooked his arm over Edgar's shoulder, using him like an arm rest, and leaned over. Edgar went perfectly still, hyper aware of the chest pressing against his back.

"He wants to try," Jimmy said, "let him try."

Nny paused and glanced past Edgar at Jimmy. He narrowed his eyes. "Why are you naked?" he said.

When Edgar turned back to see what was going on, all he could see was Jimmy the same as he was a minute before. Jimmy also looked down, as if he wasn't entirely sure he didn't remove his pants and then forget about it. "I'm not?" he said.

Nny wrinkled his nose. "You're indecent," he said, and then jammed a hand inside of his sleeve and peeled off the top-most jacket, scarred but soft leather. He stuck his arm out, jabbing at Jimmy with the jacket. The way he held it, you could see that the tag inside the neck was worn completely white.

Edgar expected Jimmy to laugh it off, but as a matter of fact, for a moment Jimmy said nothing. Then, at last, he reached out and took the jacket carefully, fingers hooking under the collar. What had looked odd and oversized on Nny managed to look about right on Jimmy, as he pulled it on over his bare shoulders. He tugged on the collar, flicking dirt off the leather.

"How do I look?" he said, cocking a hip and running a hand over his chest, like a Gucci model, pushing it just a little off his shoulder.

"Um," Edgar said.

Nny gave a sharp nod and said, "Better," as he turned on his heel. He set off for the apartment at an easy clip, confident that the door would be open for him when he arrived at it.

Edgar watched him go. "You're going to burn up in that thing," he said to Jimmy.

"Yeah," Jimmy said, twisting a little to get a better look down himself, "but Nny gave it to me, so I gotta wear it."

"I don't think that's exactly what was happening," Edgar said.

Jimmy made a ppphhhsh noise. "Potato tomato," he said, and stuck his hand in one of the pockets. His expression went a little curdled. In his hand, very carefully, he drew out a small brown dead bird.

They looked up at each other, nervously.

"You should... wash your hands," Edgar managed.

Jimmy considered the bird for a moment, and then placed it deliberately on the hood of the car. It seemed fresh enough, still plenty bendy and fluffy. "What do you think he was keeping it for?" Jimmy said, staring at it.

"I truly do not want to know," Edgar said.

Jimmy narrowed his eyes at the thing. "I do," he said.

While Jimmy hastily scrubbed his hands in the sink, Edgar loaded up Nny's waiting arms with the first of many boxes. No matter what was in them, Nny seemed unperturbed by the weight. Edgar wondered if Nny had simply stopped receiving discomfort signals from his body a long time ago.

They worked for the rest of the morning, straight through noon. As they passed the bird on the hood, Nny gave it a bare glance and then, seemingly satisfied, carried right on with his tasks. Edgar couldn't help but think of feline gifts, inscrutable half-chewed mice on the doorstep. He couldn't make heads or tails of what he was supposed to do with it. Box by box, Nny emptied their apartment of all its human peculiarities. Jimmy and Edgar lugged the sofa across the complex as Nny passed them several times on his own errand, impervious to the heat or the weight of the things he carried. At the foot of the stairs up to the new place, Jimmy set down his end of the sofa and pushed his sweaty hair off his forehead.

Edgar dropped his own end and pressed his palms into the upholstery, panting. "You should just take it off," he said, between breaths. "If you get heat stroke, I'm not sure I'll be able to get you up the stairs."

Jimmy scowled, but when he swiped at his face with the back of his hand, the wet that came off was enough to convince him. He stuck out an arm. "It's stuck to me," he admitted, looking hard in the other direction. "You want it off so bad, you do it."

Hesitant, Edgar took the sleeve in his hands. It fairly glowed with residual sunlight. He peeled it off Jimmy, carefully, pulling back the collar and working the sleeve free. As Jimmy twisted to give him better access- Edgar could feel his own pulse in his fingertips- the leather pulled down from Jimmy's neck. Edgar's thumb lingered over the black text, the swooping black shape below, tines of wicked wings spreading like a flourish.

Jimmy turned his head, although Edgar was still well out of his line of sight. "You like the ink?" he said, in a sly insinuating voice.

Edgar hastily pulled the jacket the rest of the way off, before he could actually read the words. "Here," he said, holding it out.

Jimmy took it back and tied it a little awkwardly around his waist, and then together they brought the sofa up the stairs, one precarious step at a time. The living room was smaller than the one they had left, more of the floor space segmented away for other things. There was just enough space against the balcony window to set the sofa down there, and so they did. Edgar stood back from it, a strange lump in his throat. This piece of furniture, Jimmy's bed for a week now, was about to become a kind of home for Nny.

He brushed a crumpled leaf from the upholstery, and wondered if Nny would actually sleep here, or he would just continue falling asleep on top of dumpsters on strange streets forever.

"That's all of it," Jimmy said, "right? That's gotta be fuckin' all."

Not quite able to pull himself away, Edgar said, "Sure."

"Gimme your phone," Jimmy said.

Edgar turned at that, half convinced that he was being shaken down. "I'm sorry?" he said.

Jimmy held out a hand, crooking his fingers impatiently. "I'm ordering us Chinese," he said. "You want Lo Mein or what?"

"Oh," Edgar said, and then inspected several stacked boxes for the one that held his Nokia. "Lo Mein is fine. That's a good idea, we've been working hard." He dug out the phone and turned it back on, offering it across the space.

As the door swung open again, Jimmy called out, "Hey Nny, you want Lo Mein?"

The last box tucked between his arms, Nny paused in the doorway. He looked hard at Jimmy, as if he was considering whether to trust a rotten step on the way up to an old house. His arms were visibly starting to shake, although he made no move to put down his cargo. At last, with a decisive little jerk of the chin, he said, "Yeah, okay. No pork."

Edgar made his way over to the door and held out his arms. "Here," he said, "I'll take that."

Nny pulled it tighter against himself, squinting at Edgar. "Where do you want it?" he said, instead.

"Um," Edgar said, and then pointed at the near wall. "There?"

Nny marched past him, as Jimmy was punching numbers into the cell phone, and placed it very deliberately, very smartly, right in the middle of the others. He straightened up, brushing his hands together, and gave Edgar a pointed look.

Edgar looked at him helplessly. "Thank… you."

The aggressive look melted off. Nny tipped his head away, shoving his hands in his pockets as he shrugged. "Of course," he said.

"No!" Jimmy shouted into the phone, "delivery! Fucking delivery! I know you can hear me!"

Edgar and Nny shared a look as Jimmy got progressively more wound up in his argument with the restaurant. Edgar gestured quietly for Nny to help him unpack the kitchen box, and together they pulled out the table cloth and plastic plates. They laid them out on the floor, a little playfort picnic, and Nny spread a comic book open on the carpet, as easily as if he had always lived here.

"I'll remember that when I'm keying your fucking car!" Jimmy howled, and slammed the phone down on the counter. Heaving, fists clenched around the plastic, he said to the rest of the room, "It'll be here in fifteen minutes."

Edgar gently put away the Nokia. Jimmy dropped into a sullen criss-cross at the edge of the tablecloth, at the spot Edgar had set out for him. He lifted the mug full of water and inspected it with a scowl. "Let's get blitzed, fuck this stuff."

"If you die of dehydration right after I went to the trouble of moving out to accommodate you, I will quite honestly take your shrivel corpse and run it through a wood shredder," Edgar said, taking a delicate sip from his own mug.

Nny, on the floor with his heels kicked up above him, flipped a page in his book and said, "Why wait til he's dead? He can spare a couple toes."

"What is this, roast Jimmy hour?" the younger man said.

Edgar hid a smile behind his mug. "We could do that," he said, mock thoughtfully. "Nny, would you like to do that?"

Nny looked up from his book. "Hey kid," he said, "learn how to wear a jacket like a fucking civilized person."

Edgar snorted water, coughing into his hands as the laughter got well away from him. While he worked to get his lungs and associated pipes back under control, Nny and Jimmy started shouting at each other about whether or not it was acceptable to be shirtless in one's own home, the relative merits of the waist-tied jacket look, and how many jackets a single person could wear without looking like an idiot. They were still yelling when the doorbell rang, although it was something about bell bottoms now and they seemed to be more angrily agreeing with each other than anything else. Edgar opened the door for the delivery person with a chagrined little smile.

"Thanks," he said, taking the bags from the boy. "What do I owe you?"

The delivery boy handed Edgar the receipt. He looked past Edgar's shoulder, a little strangely. "Are they always like that?" he said.

Edgar paused, bills in his hand. He could hear cups rolling into plates, the clatter of silverware. He could imagine, without needing to look back, Nny gesturing grandiosly with a fork, delivering his incomprehensible soliloquy to Jimmy knocked back on the floor. Without much effort, he could imagine the look on Nny's face, the almost religious rapture of fury. Without much effort, the look on Jimmy's- fascinated, soft-edged, almost longing.

He pressed the money into the delivery boy's hand with a sideways smile and said, "I do hope so."

[x]

Some nights, Nny disappeared as soon as they arrived home from work. They would park under the twisted pine tree below Building L and he would light down from it in perfect silence, without so much as a word of warning, and take off into the crunchy lawn between the buildings stretching on down the hill. In the whirl of his long wool coat, boots crunching glass beneath him, he would be gone like a shadow. The first night he took off and didn't come back until the next day, Edgar paced beneath the living room window, watching the streetlights come on globe by buzzing yellow globe. The sleeper sofa remained empty.

There was no telling when Nny would be around to work a shift with them. He wasn't on the payroll, legally; he was there more days than he wasn't, but the schedule said nothing about him. In a way, he was a kind of ghost - undocumented, unnoticed, coming and going in the darkness with his spare key and his haunting hollow face.

"Do you have to go?" Edgar said, one day, as casually as he could. "We're ordering pizza. There's extra marinara in it for you, if you want. The sofa is all yours."

It was growing cold again, the capricious inward breath of dying winter, and Nny stood in the falling darkness like something that grew twisted and virulent from the desert sand.

"It's better if I'm not here," Nny said. "If I don't sleep, it can't sneak up on me. You're very kind to open up your home to me, but it would be better for you if you would simply forget me."

At the back of the car, Jimmy threw the trunk shut. He stalked up to Nny, his laces loose and swinging around his calves, and didn't stop until he was a handwidth away, fists shoved in pockets.

"You better come back," he said, glaring down at the smaller man. "I don't care where you go off to, but you had better fucking come back to me."

A skitter of wind passed around their heels, all three of them, stirring the tail of Nny's coat.

"To you?" Nny echoed, lifting an eyebrow.

"Yeah," Jimmy said, leaning in, "to me."

Nny considered him for a moment, and then- ever so formally, with a wry twist of his thin lips- stepped back and dipped down into a formal bow. When he came up, there was a glitter in his nearly-black eye.

"Very well," he said. "To you."

[x]

For his twentieth birthday, Jimmy took the night off. The show was downtown, in somebody's old house- the floor had been ripped out of the downstairs, and on the bare concrete slab the band had set up their instruments for the night. Jimmy showed up about half way through the first set, already high off his ass, and proceeded to lose his shirt within the first twenty minutes. Nobody knew him here. He'd been gone for too long, on lock down for too long, and the whole scene had shifted across town to a new neighborhood in his absence. He'd just happened to hear from the girl who was trading him a celebratory joint in an alley after work, when he mentioned that he hadn't been to a show since they sent him away and she said, "You remember that band Schaudenfreudist? They got a new drummer finally, you should come see them."

They were using a busted amp and it sounded like shit but Jimmy fucking loved it. When they opened up a pit, Jimmy threw elbows like he was trying to take all of them down with him, absolutely murdered the chorus, tripped on an extention cord, and landed on top of the good amp in a heap. Vision swimming, he looked up into the grinning face of the bassist, well eventually up to his face, and had a delicious nasty thought. He propped his chin up on his hand and ran his tongue over his teeth, grinning at the way the bassist's eyes went narrow with interest. Fuck yes, he thought so.

A couple of the folks from the mosh got him by the shoulders and hauled him back into the pit, but Jimmy kept his eye on the bassist for the rest of the set, until finally the last song dissolved into static feedback. In the kitchen, surrounded by half finished BYOB liquor, Jimmy watched him come through the doorway over the rim of a plastic solo cup.

"Hey," the guy said. The rings through his eyebrow had the hard flatness of medical staples, pretty Frankenstein looking. Jimmy grinned at him.

Jimmy hit the plastic lid of the dumpster outside the kitchen door with a hollow thump, anticipation fluttering in his lungs. There was a rustle behind him as he pushed himself up, arching to show off exactly how tight his jeans were. The bassist swore. Jimmy turned his head to spy him patting down his pockets, chain clinking, in search of something he couldn't seem to find.

"Shit," the bassist said, "left my fuckin wallet at home-"

Jimmy slid back off the lid and ran a hand absently down his in-seam. His dick throbbed. "Chill," he said, "I'll just blow you."

"Yeah?" the bassist said, giving Jimmy a look of sharp interest. Jimmy, a little dizzy but coming down fast, just flashed him a grin.

With the guy leaned back against the alley wall, Jimmy snatched his jeans open with practiced ease. God, this was good- the cool night heavy with cloves and sweat, the sound of traffic beyond the edge of the neighborhood, the hot weight on his tongue- the whole world tasted sweeter than he remembered, brighter.

The bassist bit his lip and snapped his eyes closed as Jimmy did something he'd figured out how to do last year in the laundry room behind a top load washer. "Gnn, fuck," he said, "you're really good at this."

Jimmy pulled off and licked heavy up the shaft, basking in sharp pride. Hell yes, he was good at this. Talent is a pursued interest right? That's what Edgar always said, although never directly in relation to blowjobs but- mmm, wouldn't Jimmy like to show him. Take Edgar into his mouth like this and undo him, perfect poised saint Edgar, drag him down and take him apart.

Jimmy closed his eyes and hazily imagined the look on Edgar's face- Talent, hah, he'd show him talent-

After the show, after the bus ride home, Jimmy staggered up to the apartment sometime in the early hours of the morning. His key wouldn't go into the damn lock. He stood there, swearing and struggling with the jingle of keys, until finally the door swung right out from under him. Edgar hovered behind the door, dragging a knuckle under his eye, soft and bleary without his glasses sitting sharp and clear on his nose.

"Oh, Jimmy," he said, "happy birthday. How was the show?"

He drew back, pulling the door open for Jimmy, and didn't seem to notice at all that he was half dressed. Jimmy stepped past him, thinking all at once of the alley, of the hand buried in his hair.

"Wicked," he said, tossing his fucking useless keys on the table. "The new drummer is better than the old one. He's got better hair."

"Oh good," Edgar said, soft but smiling. He made no move to leave.

Jimmy stood there uncertainly for a second, overcome with something strange and almost- sad? He'd never come home to anyone before. No one had ever been at the door to ask him if he'd had a good time, no one had given a shit about that before even when they had been around. On the floor the carpet was lit with stripes of clean white, the same white as the old shirt that hung skewed over Edgar's hips. Under the hem, the edge of grey-blue boxer briefs reminded Jimmy of the fact that Edgar had been sleeping - sleeping and then waking up just to let Jimmy in. All at once, the apartment felt like a twilight dream space stretching out all around him, the only kind of space in which something as alien and moonlight-clear as Edgar could exist.

Edgar sighed, eyes drifting shut even as he stood there. "I wish you'd told me it was your birthday earlier," he said, "we could have had cake maybe."

Jimmy ran a thumb over his own mouth, without thinking. "It's cool," he said, "I already had dessert."

Edgar blinked his eyes back open. "Oh?" he said. He seemed to refocus, for a moment, giving Jimmy a belated once-over. He tilted his head, hand reaching out vaguely in the dark. "You've got something," he said, "right-"

His finger touched down on Jimmy's thigh, on a slick that glowed faintly white in the moonlight, and they both froze. The blood rushed right out of Jimmy's face, as something too loud and mixed up and adrenaline-clawed spiked up through his ribcage.

Edgar drew back his hand, almost in a trance, blinking down at his fingers.

"Well," he said, "good… night."

And he turned around, like a clockwork person, and walked straight back into his bedroom. After a second of dumb staring, Jimmy finally got himself back together and made his way back to the other bedroom. All the vicious pride of earlier in the night went sour in his stomach. Some fucking Casanova he was, he'd fucked it up and then he'd just stood there like a fucking idiot, like a dumb kid caught in the hall with dirty bedsheets. If he wasn't so mad at himself, he'd be even more turned on than he was. Self-loathing tangled up its fingers up in his sex drive and gave it a merciless twist.

He was sitting on his mattress, still bare except for the untucked sheet behind him, untying his boots when he heard it. It sent a shiver straight up his spine. The sound was soft- almost a nothing, a wind in the door- a sound like a moan, through the wall separating Edgar's room from his.

In the space of his bare room, Jimmy looked up and held his breath, laces forgotten in his hand. The dark was perfectly silent. As he reached shakily for the zipper of his pants, he wondered if he'd even really heard it - if it was just another thing he'd imagined to fuck with himself, another unreal thing in the back of his head.

There was a thump, in the darkness, almost as if the back of somebody's head was falling back against a wall.

[x]

There was a fight at the soup kitchen, on a Tuesday, and all hell broke loose. It started with a mistake, most likely - somebody pushed Nny, out in the dining area. He'd been out on tray wrangling duty, after spending the morning being extremely reckless with the mincing knife and making Edgar much too nervous to focus. In retrospect, they should have just called it a day when he jammed the tip of a slicing knife straight into the body of a whole carrot and started trying to carve its heart out.

One moment, Edgar was vaguely aware of some discussion about dates or calendars going on a little ways away, as he flipped through the accounting book in search of last month's produce budget, and the next thing he knew there was the cacophonous rattle of the tray cart overturning.

"Gunsel!" Nny howled, "I'll show you _gunsel,_ you ungrateful slovenly weevil!"

Edgar dropped the book entirely, tearing around the length of the serving counter to get at the dining area. Bodies were scattering away from around Nny, although not as many as you would hope, as the tiny maddened creature buried the curved tips of his prosthetic in another man's hand, pinning it to the table. His whole body twisted with the force of grinding down, into the breaking skin.

"How dare you!" Nny shouted, hand scrambling across the table for a bread knife just out of his reach. "You unloved nothing! You viper-mouthed shit bucket! Is petty vitriol the only human thing left in your bloated carcass?"

Edgar skidded across the concrete, completely forgetting everything he'd learned about Nny over the last year, and caught him hard around the middle. He held tight, dragging him back away from the table and the silverware as Nny scratched and writhed in his grip, clawing out at the man whose hand was starting to leak blood.

"You are a waste!" Nny howled, "You complain about the coldness of the world and when the world offers you even the slenderest kindness, you look at the face of tenderness and human mercy and you spit in its eye! You deserve nothing!"

"Nny, please," Edgar said, wincing into the back of his neck, "please, calm down, please,

Behind them, at the edge of the kitchen, Jimmy called out, "Holy shit, you need a hand?"

"Let me go!" Nny said, boots sliding across the slick floor in his effort to break free. "I'll kill him! If he talks about you like that again, I'll kill him!"

"That doesn't make me want to let you go!" Edgar said, desperately trying to hold his ground. "Jimmy, can you get this gentleman out of here, please!"

"No sweat," Jimmy said. He jogged right past and hauled the patron up by his grimy collar. Blood dripped as the man staggered, sniffling piteously, and Jimmy marched him quickly towards the exit. The moment the door closed behind them, the whole writhing livewire of Nny fell limp in Edgar's arms. His chest heaved.

"You would never do that," he panted, "he doesn't know you, you'd never use someone like that."

Edgar bit his lip, caught between trying to understand and accidently inflaming a fresh wound. "That was about… me?"

Belatedly, he let go. Nny took a step forward and then stalled out, as if he was unsure where he was going now that the target was out of his line of sight. He closed his arms around himself, becoming impossibly small.

"I know you," he said, the tips of his prosthetic pulling at his sleeve. "I know you…"

"Can you tell me what this is about?" Edgar said. He wished he hadn't let go.

Nny turned his head. The intensity of his expression almost made Edgar's ears ring. "You're not trying to take anything from anyone. It's all of them who don't understand. They should be so lucky to touch the hem of your fucking apron."

He turned on his heel, a hundred curious eyes watching him go in silence.

"If I can't believe in you," he said, "I might as well go back down into that place and let her grind me away."

[x]

"Why do you spend so much time out in the city?" Edgar asked him finally, after they had been living in the new place a couple months. He was at the sink, pouring hot water into a cup of instant noodles, because the soup they'd brought home from work was something Nny hadn't been able to eat.

"What do you mean?" Nny had said, head cocked, perched on the kitchen table with his boots swinging back and forth beneath him.

"At night," Edgar said. He switched hands, fingertips a little seared. "You have a place here," he went on, "why do you walk around like that? It's dangerous out there. I know you don't care about the crime stats, but you have to have seen enough to know I'm not blowing this out of proportion."

"I've crawled through darker pits," Nny said.

Edgar set the cup down. He looked up at Nny, trying to read something legible in his brittle alien face. "Once," Edgar said, "I walked into a park uptown. It was early in the morning. No one else was out. There was this ribcage sitting on the bench, underneath the fountain- skinned clean, bone showing. Whoever did it, they left everything inside. I don't know where the rest of it was, it was hacked off so clean at either end- it didn't even look real, except that it smelled real, it was sweet like old garbage and I thought- I thought, there's something living in this city that I couldn't begin to understand even if I tried. It would destroy me, just to begin to unravel it."

"It's not so difficult," Nny said, in an absent tone that sent shivers up Edgar's spine. "All you have to do is think of people as things. Once you do that, it's easy."

Edgar sighed, admitting defeat. "I wish you wouldn't leave," he said. "I wish you would stay here. With us."

For a moment, Nny's gaze went distant and unfocused. "I used to hate leaving home," he said, as if he was speaking through water, "I hated all the noise and the staring and the unwashed sneering masses, it was such a chore just to… open the door…"

His fingers twitched in his lap, spasmodically, wrists jittering.

"I couldn't leave that place," he said, "the door wasn't locked but I knew I couldn't leave. Sometimes I thought… if I stepped foot beyond the door, I'd turn to salt and blow away. There were so many dark rooms, I went up and down the stairs, I went up and down the stairs, I went-"

Edgar left the sink and crossed the floor, to where Nny was sitting, staring right through him. He opened his palms, between them, and said, "May I?"

Face absolutely still, paralyzed with whatever dark mood had overtaken him, Nny turned his one good eye towards Edgar. "Okay," he whispered.

Gently, Edgar took Nny's hands in his own. They shook, gloved in fraying wool, cold to the touch despite the warmth of the apartment. Nny looked down at their hands, fear and wonder in the hollows of his face.

"I'm sorry," Edgar said, holding him tight. "If you want to be able to go, you go. I just thought it would be safer for you to sleep here. I'm not trying to hold you captive. "

It happened as slowly as a building coming down, inevitable but laborious- Nny slowly lowered his head into Edgar's shoulder. The shock of contact almost made Edgar gasp, although he'd watched the whole slow-tumbling process as it unfolded.

"I watch you sleep sometimes," Nny said. "Sometimes I come back and I go into your room to make sure you're still breathing, in case you disappeared while I was gone."

"O-oh," Edgar said, keeping very still.

"I like the sound of your lungs," Nny said, "it's soothing. You're so calm, I think when all the oceans rise and the mountains fall into the sea, your bed will be the last place that the darkness swallows. Even the darkness, I think, will have to stop at your bedside and listen to you breathe for a moment, before it crawls into your mouth and eats you too."

Edgar squeezed his hands. "That may be the scariest thing you've ever said to me," he said.

"When the darkness finds me again," Nny said, "I don't want to lead it to you. I don't want to see it take you like it took that girl."

Edgar frowned at that. "Who," he began.

Nny lifted a hand and pressed it to Edgar's cheek, scratchy and woolen and strangely waxy where the bare flesh touched him. Edgar's breath abruptly left him. Nny pulled back and stared up at him, searching for something behind the skin, behind the very matter.

Tissue paper and bird bones, bandages and delirium - everything that Nny was fit easily into Edgar's hands. But with Nny holding him by the cheek, wistful and heavy with an understanding beyond Edgar's reach, it was Edgar who felt small.

"This is your home too," Edgar said. "Whatever you're afraid of, we won't let it touch you."

"Oh, Edgar," Nny said, as gently as a martyr on the gallow step, "how I envy your conviction."

[x]

It was a work night, but that didn't matter. Jimmy came back out of the bedroom after an hour of trying to put his face on, consistently fucking up the eyeliner for some stupid reason, and other annoying but necessary prep work. This outfit, he was pretty sure, could light a pack of cigarettes all by itself. He tugged the low hanging neckline of his tank until it showed off the perfect amount of pecs. Okay, so he wasn't built like some other guys, but he didn't need to be, did he, in an outfit like this? Jeans pushed low on his hips, Jimmy left his bedroom with a pointed swish.

In the front room, Edgar looked up from his book, as Jimmy stopped in the hall and smoothed back his hair in the bathroom mirror. He was reading one of Nny's books, the one about the bug, a pencil tapped against his teeth. Behind the sliding glass door, on the balcony, Nny was lecturing a lizard on the rail like he was just about ready to lose patience with the whole thing.

"You look-" Edgar said, "-nice?"

Jimmy stopped, hand in hair, and glared at him. "I look hot as shit, Vargas."

Edgar's lip twitched. "My mistake," he said. "Are you headed out?"

"No," Jimmy said, wrinkling his nose, "I spent half an hour on my fuckin eyeliner just so I could watch TV on the couch."

"Do you have a… date, tonight?"

Jimmy pushed out a short breath, and gave up on his hair. "Not really," he said, "but there's a thing at the Shark Tank and the last time I was there I hooked up with this guy so like, who knows."

He watched Edgar carefully, out of the corner of his eye, gauging him for some reaction to the memory. Edgar went back to looking at his book, but his eyes didn't move over the page. "I think I would have preferred it if you had a date," he muttered.

Jimmy came across the room and sat on the table, hip just an inch away from Edgar's fingers. He crossed his arms. "You're not jealous, are you?" he prodded.

Edgar glanced up at him. "I was never really the type to hook up," he said, with a meaningful flick of the eye up and down Jimmy's person.

Christ, he really couldn't just come out and say something, could he? Jimmy frowned at the far wall. Three months they'd been living together, and Jimmy had no more god damn idea what Edgar wanted now than he had three months ago. Here he was, looking hot as shit, sitting right in front of Edgar, and he was getting - what? Stone cold nothing.

The whispered suggestion in that midnight moment, between their two rooms, still lit up Jimmy's insides whenever he thought of it. He'd lost count of how many nights since then he'd leaned back against their shared wall and tried to rub the hunger out of himself, imagining that Edgar was doing the same thing, a sheet of drywall away. He hadn't been quiet. He wanted Edgar to hear him.

Christ, he needed to get laid.

"Whatever," he said, fiddling with his fishnet gloves, "I got a bus to catch."

Edgar set the book down, spreading the pages open over the tabletop. He stood, sliding his chair back, and looked down at Jimmy. There was something about his face - something that made Jimmy's stomach roll with nervous anticipation, something as quiet and volatile as clear gasoline. He held his breath.

Edgar licked his thumb, and leaned in close. He pushed his fingertip under the corner of Jimmy's eye, warm and hard against the skin. The tiniest smudge of eyeshadow flashed on his finger as he drew back.

"Keep your nose clean," he said, and picked up his book, and left the room.

[x]

It was a sunday, not too late in the evening, and the weather was just this side of beautiful, bright with April newness. Because his hands were full of groceries in heavy paper bags, Edgar only kicked the door to his apartment and called out, "I'm home!"

For a moment nothing happened. Then there was a rustle and a muffled bang on the other side of the door, which swung open to reveal Jimmy in a state of rushed dishevelment. There were several angry red slash marks across his cheek.

"What were you doing," Edgar asked, warily.

"The cat's back," Jimmy said, a little breathlessly.

Edgar blinked, and then narrowed his eyes. "It had better not be inside my apartment," he said.

Jimmy's pupils actually shrunk. He slammed the door closed. There was muffled shouting and banging, and then at last the door popped back open. "Nope," he said, hanging his whole weight off it. "Cat free, that's us."

"Good," Edgar said, slowly, "because if the super catches a whiff of pet on any of us you can kiss your paycheck goodbye. Here," he pushed one of the bags forward, "take this in."

The inside of the building wasn't much worse than he'd left it this morning. Nny had asked for the day off earlier in the week, which was unusual enough that Edgar had agreed without pressing him. He'd just done the day by himself, just like old times, but Sundays were only half-days anyway. The boys had got most of the prep work out of the way on Saturday, so he'd had plenty of time to swing by the supermarket before it got too late. He set his bag down on the counter, next to the scattered triple A batteries and bills.

"Johnny!" he called. "I got your things! Where is he?"

Jimmy pursed his lips and looked in the opposite direction of the balcony, so naturally Edgar turned to the balcony and picked his way over the discarded sheafs of sketch paper on the carpet. He could just make out Johnny's head past the top of the sofa bed, through the sliding glass door. When he pushed it open, three big mismatched eyes stared up at him.

"Nny," Edgar sighed. "You know we aren't allowed to have animals up here."

The cat, a green eyed stray with a matted black coat, lost interest in him and started licking itself. Nny, crouched in front of it, was equally disinterested.

"It's not fair," Jimmy moaned, throwing himself across the sofa bed, boots and all. "I'm the one who put in all the work! I put out the food and followed it around the neighborhood, and it hates me."

Edgar looked from the paper-littered floor to the broken pencil still strapped awkwardly to Nny's hand. He had a feeling the distraction had come at a good time. This was the second time this week that Nny had tried to draw something, and last time he'd lost his temper spectacularly. Edgar reached down and picked up the nearest sheet, considering its wobbly graphite lines with trepidation.

Jimmy thumped his boot against the cushion. "I'm gonna make it love me, whether it likes it or not."

"Good luck with that," Edgar murmured, and carefully folded up the disaster of a sketch. "Nny, come on. I got your stuff. Give it a look over."

After a second, Nny picked himself up and slid past Edgar, silently. It was one of those days, Edgar guessed. He trailed after Nny, nervously folding the sketch paper into smaller and smaller squares.

"The eggs were on sale so I got a whole dozen," he said, "I wasn't sure what you were going to use the horseradish for so I just bought a whole root? Oh, no, don't look at the price on the lamb, it's fine, you never ask me to buy meat for you, I don't mind."

"It doesn't have the bone in," Nny said, frowning down at it.

"Oh," Edgar said. "I'm- is that important?"

"Yes," Nny said, "I think so."

"I'm sorry," Edgar said, heart sinking. "I didn't know."

Nny paused, with the bag of dates clutched between his mangled hands. The broken pencil poked into the bag. He looked more confused than anything else, his sallow face screwed up in frustrated uncertainty.

"What did you want all this for?" Edgar said. "As glad as I am to see you eating something other than canned spaghetti, none of these things really seem toï¿½ go with each other."

Nny set down the dates and fished out the celery. "I'm making dinner," he said.

It took Edgar a second to process that. "Do you mean," he said, "for all of us?"

"Yeah," Nny said, and ripped the pencil out of his hand with his teeth. Edgar caught it before he could spit it on the floor and set it down on the counter.

"Nny's making dinner?" Jimmy called, from the sofa. "Call the fucking national guard, this place is about to be a war zone."

Edgar eyed the horseradish root. "Why don't you let me make dinner," Edgar said. "You can tell me what you want me to make, and I'll have it done in a jiffy."

"No," Nny said, scooping up the food into his arms and clutching it tight. "I'm making dinner, and that's the end of it. If I can't make one fucking dinner for my family then what's the point of even feeding this wretched flesh machine?"

Edgar's heart fluttered. All thoughts of horseradish and scalded pots disappeared completely from his mind. When he looked back to the sofa, Jimmy was giving him a keenly satisfied look.

While Nny worked in the kitchenette, Edgar went to picking up the scattered remains of today's attempt at art. They spent enough time at the soup kitchen most days that by the time they got home everyone was too tired to do much more than watch TV or run the absolutely necessary errands. In Johnny's case, it was a mixed kind of blessing. Less time to ruminate on what he'd lost. Some of these off-kilter sketches were actually a bit frightening, especially as the pencil strokes got more and more angry.

Edgar had moved on from the floor and was reluctantly wiping down the bathroom counter when Nny let out a wall-rattling "Fuck!" and Edgar's feet nearly skidded out from underneath him as he lurched out into the living room. "What," he said, "what happened?"

Jimmy was half-up from the sofa, arm under him, but when Edgar looked to him he only gave an uncertain frown. In the kitchen, the split remains of an egg were clenched in Nny's upraised fist. Yolk dripped down his wrist. At first Edgar thought it was just the egg thing-round delicate objects were notoriously hard for Nny to hold onto-but at a second glance, Nny didn't even seem to be aware of the mess in his hand.

"Wine," he said. "Shit. I forgot wine."

Edgar slid closer, palms up. "Nny, you don't drink."

"Of course I don't fucking drink," Nny said, his gaze snapping over to Edgar. "I'm not here to get shitfaced off expired produce like some dismal burnout in a back alley."

Jimmy raised his hand. "I am!"

"So what do you need wine for," Edgar said, ignoring him.

"It's not right if I don't have it! None of it is fucking right!" Nny slammed his slimy hand down on the counter, smashing the egg shell flat. "I just want to do this one thing!"

"Hey," Edgar said, gently, "it's okay. Look, if it's so important to you, you can use mine."

"Yours?" Nny repeated, at the same time that Jimmy said, "Yours?"

Edgar came around the corner of the kitchenette and reached up into the cabinet with what little good china they had, mostly crystal dinner glasses he'd inherited from his mother. He nudged them aside and reached into the back, through the dust, and retrieved a bottle of Pinot Noir. Jimmy made a choking noise.

"You had that in the house the whole time?" he said.

"It's for a special occasion," Edgar said. He shot Jimmy a quelling look. "A tuesday night with chinese takeout is not a special occasion."

This bottle, specifically, was a nice one, in reserve. To be honest, he used to drink a lot more back when he lived alone with the Work. But then Jimmy had moved in and it hadn't seemed fair for Edgar to drink when he wouldn't let Jimmy do it, and with Nny thrown into the mix it just shook out that Edgar honestly hadn't thought much about drinking for the last couple months.

He considered the bottle in his hand. "You're not going to cook with it," he said, instinctively appalled at the idea of wasting top shelf wine on the cook pot. "Are you?"

Nny reached over and pulled it out of his grip, cradling it like an infant against his skinny chest. "No. Pull those cups down, please."

Edgar obliged, sighing with relief. He set three of his mother's glasses on the counter.

"We need five," Nny said. He fumbled with the tap and ran his slimy hand underneath the water, washing clear liquid off the ragged stumps of his fingers. As an afterthought, he ran the slightly slimy wine bottle under the tap too.

"Five?" Edgar said. His hand hovered over the counter. Were they having company? Was that why Nny had decided to cook out of the blue? Edgar wasn't even aware that Nny had other friends.

"The other one's for Elijah," Nny said, turning back to the eggs. In a little mixing bowl, he had gathered up what looked like a pile of coffee grounds and onions.

Edgar looked from the wine to the salad to the white chunk of horseradish, and he thought of a hundred little requests and reactions over the last year that he'd taken for granted as part of Nny's obscure and idiosyncratic preferences. Weird but adamant dining preferences. Odd sayings.

"Nny," he said, "are you Jewish?"

"No way," Jimmy said, from the sofa, "Nny doesn't even believe in God."

"I didn't say I don't believe in him," Nny said, sourly, "I said if he's real I'm going to rip his heart out and eat it."

"For power?" Jimmy said.

"So that he can feel the screaming emptiness of mortal existence," Nny said, "with which he has cursed this miserable planet. But yeah, I'm Jewish."

Edgar closed the cabinet, turned around, and leaned back against the counter. "I can't believe you didn't mention this before. I would have made accommodations. Adjusted the menu."

For a second Nny looked back at him, puzzlement wrinkling his nose. "But you already do that."

Edgar blinked. Well, he thought, that was true, wasn't it? He'd just absently tucked away each of Nny's uncontextualized requests over the months and carried on oblivious. In retrospect, he really should have picked up on it when milk came into the equation.

"We used to do passover seder," Nny said, "when I was little. It was a family thing. I can almost remember it-I can almostï¿½"

He ran his knuckles over the sickly white of the horseradish, his gaze distant and unfocused.

"There was a table in the front room-it had a gouge in it from this time I got mad at dinner and stuck a knife in it-there were special plates, a whole set of them, with the blue trim-my father was home-my mother had the day off-"

Edgar bit his lip, but when nothing else came, he said, "I think that's the most I've ever heard you talk about your family."

"It all seems so far away now..." Nny said. "Another person's lifetimeï¿½"

"I kinda thought you just rolled out of a gutter somewhere fully grown," Jimmy said, sounding disappointed.

"Sometimes it feels like I did," Nny replied, darkly. "It feels like a stranger's life that I've dragged with me from that hellmouth. Perhaps it was carved out of some other wretched unfortunate and left for me to find. Regardless," he went on, flicking the knife as he went back to work, "if I can't trust my own memories, I'll just have to make new ones for myself."

"Ah," Edgar said, and swallowed down the thickness in his throat. "Yes thatï¿½ makes sense, I think."

"You can set the table," Nny said, without turning. "Leave a spot for Elijah."

Their little table had exactly three chairs, two of which matched, and a third which Nny had brought home one day after one of his mysterious disappearances. Edgar scanned the room for another option. Somehow he doubted you were supposed to stack cushions for a dead prophet to sit on. But there was an old forgotten folding chair on the balcony, which in the times before the boys moved in had been Edgar's solo drinking spot. That would work.

Jimmy came up over the back of the sofa as Edgar passed him. "Isn't this weird for you?" he said, setting his chin on his crossed wrists. "You're Catholic, aren't you?"

With one hand on the rusted joint of the folding chair, Edgar looked up at him. "You do know that Jesus was Jewish, don't you?"

Jimmy squinted at him. "What." he said.

"Oh boy," Edgar said, and closed up the chair with a concerted heave. "This is going to be an interesting dinner conversation."

"If you try to fucking educate me in my own house I'm gonna throw myself out the window," Jimmy said, which was a familiar sentiment by now.

In the kitchen, Nny's knife thocked down on the cutting board. "You're gonna sit down and shut up long enough for me to tell the passover story," he said, without looking up. "You have to tell the story. I remember that much."

Jimmy screwed up his face, but the fight was out of him already. "If you gotta," he said.

Edgar set up the table, meticulously, as Nny worked his way through the kitchen leaving wreckage in his wake. He made good food, as long as you kept the oven on a loud timer, but good god he left a mess behind him. As the evening wore on, Edgar convinced him to let a little bit of help into the kitchen, as so as Nny departed from one task to another, Edgar and Jimmy took turns sweeping and wiping down behind him. Edgar cleared the bills and batteries and assorted detritus off the top of the kitchenette counter as well, to make more room for the bowls of various ingredients.

It was a little like being at work, but somehow sweeter- the quiet, the sun slipping lower over the balcony ledge, the strange and warm smells of the meal coming together bit by bit- it felt different in a way that held Edgar tight by the heart. Jimmy turned on the shitty Barbie Radio that Nny brought home the month before and spun the dial until he found the only thing they could agree on (it was Queen). As Freddie Mercury cried for the chorus to find him somebody to love, Edgar lifted the pitcher of tea from where the mint was sitting to steep just as Nny came away from the oven with a pan and slung it into the sink where the pitcher had been a moment before.

As much as they had lived together for a while now, as much as Edgar had tried to make their apartment a home, that night was the first night that it ever felt so much like a real family. The sound of the radio, the way that Jimmy's back straightened, his hard silent pride at being part of this- Nny's determination to feed them both, even as he barely touched his own plate- it all came together with such a terrible sweetness that Edgar almost couldn't taste his tea.

When Nny told the story for them, there was a lot more blood and rains of fire than Edgar remembered, and Jimmy- predictably- loved it.

[x]

Towards the end of April, Edgar lifted his head from his book, on the balcony, and said, with a suspicious glare, "Pollen."

"What?" Jimmy said, although from this angle he was just a pair of boots slung over the back of the sofa.

"I've got to wash the car," Edgar sighed. He set his book down and lifted himself from the chair, spine cracking in protest. He'd barely been home an hour, he could still feel the heat of the kitchen on the back of his neck. Ironically, now that he was consistently finishing work at a reasonable hour of the afternoon, he felt more and more exhausted by the work. It was as if he hadn't even noticed how tired he was until he started being able to spend time on leisure again.

"No you don't," Jimmy said, squinting up at Edgar as he passed back into the comparative dimness of the apartment. "It's not even dirty, I can still see the paint color."

"I absolutely despair of your upbringing," Edgar said, and pulled his shirt over his head. "I'm going down, I think there's a spigot on this side of the building."

"You're not gonna just take it to a carwash?" Jimmy said. When Edgar turned back to him, his expression was a little too intent - Edgar abruptly wished he'd waited to do that until he was downstairs.

"No," he said, "I don't have the patience for them. I'd rather just do it myself."

Jimmy slid his legs off the back of the sofa and came upright. The comic he'd been reading fell forgotten on the floor. "I'll help," he said.

Edgar cocked an eyebrow at him. "Are you volunteering to perform manual labor?" he said.

"Only for you, babe," Jimmy said, and walked right past him to the door, as if nothing at all was amiss. In his wake, Edgar stood for several seconds simply staring at the bright rectangle of light before him, the landing beyond the door, and the empty space where Jimmy had passed for the bare fraction of a moment.

Arms full of soap bottles and rags and such, Edgar came down the stairs to find Jimmy digging through the trunk. He came out with the full heft of a deep pot Edgar had been meaning to dispose of after irreparably scalding the bottom earlier in the month. He'd been putting it off. He'd had that pot for years.

After some inspection, it appeared that the end of the garden hose had been welded to the spigot outside the building, which was clever enough that Edgar had no choice but be impressed by it. When he got back, hose in hand, Jimmy was waiting for him with shirt in hand.

Honestly, he should be used to this. It was only that being around other men in various states of undress had always made Edgar very nervous, as he had always walked the thin white line between drawing attention to himself by being too shy and drawing attention to himself by being too interested. Egos were volatile, phobias were heavy-fisted. It was only that, the old wariness, and nothing else.

As Jimmy bent down to fish a rag out of the makeshift bucket, his tattoo sat on top of his twisting skin like an indelibly printed wink. Edgar gave in to curiosity once and for all, and painstakingly read it upsidedown. His eyes went wide.

"Jimmy," he said, "what in god's name have you got written on your back."

One hand in the bucket, Jimmy looked up at him. He grinned, more teeth than Edgar knew what to do with.

"You like it?" he said, bending his arm back to pat himself on the shoulder. "Last paycheck before they carted me off."

 _I'll suck your dick in Hell_ , read the slice of skin where neck met shoulder, with a batlike flourish below the text.

Edgar pressed his knuckles to his forehead and squeezed his eyes shut. He didn't know what he'd expected. He hadn't expected anything really, and the reality was so much worse.

"When you say it like that," he said, "it sounds like you're making a date of it."

Jimmy came to his feet with a wink. "Who says I ain't?"

"Mary have mercy," Edgar muttered, "what were you thinking?"

Jimmy shrugged, visibly delighted by Edgar's consternation. "I was thinking I had enough people telling me I was going to hell, I might as well do something fun while I'm down there."

Edgar gave him a look, but went back to putting away the soap bottle. Wasn't that like Jimmy, to get the last word and go down on his own sword laughing. Ever determined to be worse than people thought he was, ever the contrarian. Edgar had to admit, it was true to form.

Hands full of soapy cotton, the two of them scrubbed their way across the volvo. Edgar looked up from washing dust off the side mirror to find Jimmy sprawled across the hood, reaching for the windshield wiper on the far side.

"You could just come around this side," Edgar said, resting a hip against the hood. The rag over his forearm dripped suds onto his jeans, but he'd given up trying to avoid that.

Jimmy looked up at him. Still nearly prone over the hood, he pulled his hand back and propped his chin up on it. "What, you don't like the sexy carwash girl look?"

Edgar felt his ears burning. "Haha," he said. "I think that only works if someone is inside the car."

With a squeak and a creak of the suspension, Jimmy climbed up onto the hood, hands and knees and bare feet, and grinned at Edgar. "You mean the titty show," he said, rapping the windshield with the back of his wet knuckles. "You wanna see the titty show, Vargas?"

Edgar, quite frankly, wished that he was dead.

"I could Whitesnake the shit out of this thing," Jimmy said, craning his neck to look over the roof of the car. "Really give the old trap a midlife crisis."

"Please don't," Edgar said, faintly.

Jimmy glanced back at him. Half his chest was glittering with water, the faint outline of ribs and pectorals, pale skin already starting to go a little freckled where the sun had touched it. The knees of his black jeans were dark with water. For a moment Edgar could see it so clearly: Jimmy bending down to press the feral benediction of his kiss onto Edgar's lips, white and grey as a raincloud against the sky.

Edgar coughed into his fist and threw his rag into the sudsy pot. "Come down from there," he said, "your belt is going to scratch the paint."

Jimmy blew out a puff of air and slid down. He swung the dripping square of his rag over his bare shoulder and pushed back his hair. "Don't you ever have any fun," he griped.

Edgar gave the question its due consideration. "Well," he said, after a moment, "I enjoy living with both of you on a daily basis."

"That ain't even in the realm of what I meant," Jimmy said, making a face. "Jesus, you don't even know what the word means, huh?"

Edgar contemplated that for a moment. Slowly, he reached for the hose on the ground. "Let's see," he said, and aimed the nozzle straight at Jimmy's chest.

Jimmy let out a furious noise and came right at him, but Edgar only spun away from the car and pointed the stream at Jimmy's open mouth. Shaking with laughter, Edgar allowed himself to be pinned to the side of the car and the hose to be wrested from his grip. As Jimmy snarled and threw the thing aside, Edgar reached up and swiped water from Jimmy's forehead, still laughing.

"See?" he said, breathlessly, "Fun."

Jimmy froze under his touch. Edgar's fingers were in his damp hair, smoothing back the wet strands, and for a moment he seemed uncertain of how to respond. Then he shifted a fraction of an inch closer, a hand coming up to press into the glass at Edgar's shoulder.

"Dirty trick," he said.

"I admit to it," Edgar said, smiling up at him.

"You wanna play dirty with me, Vargas?" Jimmy said.

Adrenaline went off like a capsule bomb in Edgar's chest, irradiating his ribs. His smile became something else, although he wasn't sure what. His hand hovered between them, unsure of safe landing.

"I don't know," he said, "do you?"

Raincloud shadow, Jimmy looked down at him. His eyes snapped wide and then slitted, his mouth opened as if he was about to answer. Edgar pushed himself up and caught the soft pink lip in his teeth - dragged Jimmy gently down against him - caught his face in either hand and kissed him hard, in the sunshine and the glitter of soap, tasting his warm softness -

Edgar groaned against him. In the midst of everything else, elbows and hard nails and whipcord thinness, his mouth was unbearably soft and lovely. In the very moment that Jimmy started to unfreeze, to reach for him, Edgar ducked down and extricated himself from the moment before it could become any more dangerous. Ridiculous, desperate Edgar, nothing interesting, nothing special, what do you think you're doing here?

"I shouldn't have done that," he said.

"You fucking _what?_ "

Edgar bent down and retrieved the garden hose. "You can go inside if you want, I'll finish the rest."

Behind him, he could hear the hard smack of rag hitting metal.

He took a deep breath and pulled his smile back on. He had enough. He just had to teach himself how to be satisfied with it.

[x]

Night came up over the city like somebody pulling a bag over a hostage's head. Jimmy sat on the trunk of the sparkling fucking volvo and whipped another stone at the demented cheerful face below the window across the road. He was aiming for the cow-shaped planter. He kept hitting the wood paneling.

If he could just get the aim right, he could punch right through the snout and crack its grinning little face open. Bye bye Mary Moo Cow.

The car heaved and bounced, as Nny clambered up beside him. Jimmy spared him a glance, enough to gauge the mood. Nny had his knees pulled up to his chin, but his face was calm enough, maybe a little pensive. His long bandages were starting to unravel around his neck, hanging loose over the V of his neck.

"I'm getting you a fuckin eyepatch," Jimmy said, going back to his petty task. "We can't keep wrapping you up like a bad halloween costume once a week."

"Neat," Nny said. "Very Grimnir. We can tell people I popped it out to gain the secrets of necromancy."

Jimmy paused with a stone in his hand, flipping it absently. "I'd believe it," he said.

Nny showed his teeth. "I know how to make people dead," he said, "not so much the other part."

Jimmy pitched the stone across the parking lot and hit wood again. "You killed people, didn't you?" he said, reaching for another pebble in the pile between them. "Not just the artist. Other people."

"I think so," Nny said. "I don't remember much from after I got out. I might have gotten a bit testy with some other squatters." He tucked his chin into his fist. He'd left the prosthetic behind somewhere. "When I was hers, I remember, she used to ask me to help her sometimes. She was so beautiful when she was working. Terrible. Magnificent. I'm not sure whether that counts or not."

The old burst of rage flared up in Jimmy, and he squeezed down tight around a stone. "Don't count a damn thing that bitch made you do," he said.

"You're angry with her," Nny observed, casting a glance Jimmy's way. "I went to her willingly."

"That doesn't give her the right," Jimmy gritted out.

Nny opened his hand, twisting the digits in front of himself. "I'm hers," he said, "wherever I go, whatever I do, I'm still hers."

Jimmy turned on him, pulling his knee up on the trunk and scattering the mass of stones across the trunk. "The fuck you are," he said, jabbing a finger at Nny. "Nobody owns you but you. You're everything you got in this world, and there ain't nobody can take that from you."

"A heavy weight," Nny said, "that kind of freedom."

"Don't you wanna be free?"

Nny closed his hand. "I'm not certain I remember how to be," he said.

Jimmy made to grab Nny by the shoulders, and only caught himself as his fingers brushed wool. Empty handed but not quite willing to retreat, he said, "I'll burn her out of you, if I have to. Show me how to do it and I will."

Nny looked down at his hands. He looked up. He didn't seem angry.

"It's so strange," he said, his one eye as black and shining as a precious stone, "looking at you. You're nothing but a wreckage slapped together from carnal desires and vengeful impulses, and still, when you look at me like that, you burn me."

Jimmy closed his hands and drew back a few inches. "I know what I am," he said. "You don't gotta insult me."

"You were kind to me," Nny said, "when I was no one. I would have gone on being no one, forever, if you hadn't reached out for me."

Jimmy swallowed a thick feeling in his throat. "I dunno if I'd call it that," he said.

"I can't tell the difference between your anger and your kindness. With you, it all burns the same."

"I survive," Jimmy said, feeling bare and wounded and twitching underneath it. If Nny wanted to wound him, Jimmy would let him.

"I'm like a shell," Nny said, thoughtfully. "Filled with poison. If the poison were gone, I don't know what would remain."

He opened his hand, in the space between them, bare and warped.

"Reach out for me," he said. "If you can burn it out of me, I consent to be burned."

Jimmy took his hand, as gently as he knew how to, and then in the quiet that fell around them, placed stone after stone into Nny's right palm, each of them singing heavily through the air and thumping at last against wood. As they fell to the earth, harmless and homebound, a faraway plane made its slow blinking path across the sky.

[x]

There was a strange mood in the house that week, and a strange mood at the kitchen. Edgar had gotten so used to the absent chatter of the car ride in, to the lingering evening hours moving in and out of each other's space, that the sudden silence unbalanced him. It wasn't that no one talked, because they did - it was more the quality of the absence between conversations, an inexplicable tension. By far the strangest thing was watching Jimmy swipe the phone from its seat in the living room and carry it off to his room, in complete silence.

On Thursday night, Jimmy came out of his room almost incandescently made up, heavy dark eyes and a glittering choker tight around his throat, and barely paused on his way out to say- "Don't wait up. I got a date."

For a few hours after Jimmy left, Edgar mostly read. He made himself some quick dinner, too, and picked up some scattered christmas lights which Nny, he assumed, had left shoved up under the sofa. Where he got this stuff was anybody's bet. Edgar did not wonder what Jimmy was doing, or who he was talking to, or who was touching him-

His fingers twitched on the twisted wire.

No matter how hard he tried to be happy for Jimmy and his fresh new sea of choices - how could he resent anyone for wanting to breathe free air again - the tight black thing in Edgar's stomach never quite unclenched its claws.

He was starting to come out of his skin, listening every night for the sound of Jimmy unwinding in the darkness. He didn't understand it. Surely Jimmy hadn't been that careless when he lived in the halfway house, surely not when he was incarcerated. It felt like a sordid novel, imagining that - hungry, clutching strangers burying Jimmy's whipcord body under their broad anonymous hands. Surely this was new. Something about freedom, perhaps.

It felt like it had been worse, the last couple of days, almost - almost angrier? Edgar didn't want to attribute himself a bigger place in other people's lives than he meritted, but he really could swear that everything had changed right after the car wash episode.

Truth be told, it might have been his own contrarian streak that kept him up so late in the evening, cleaning things that didn't strictly need cleaning. He'd stay up if he chose to. He was in the kitchen boiling water to use on the drain when he heard the key in the lock.

The pot was boiling, and without looking back at it, Edgar automatically flicked off the stovetop. He didn't move. Jimmy came through heavily, a hand on the wall, stepping into the half-light with blinking eyes.

There was something distinctly hard-used about Jimmy's wild hair and wrinkled clothing, the way he favored one hip a little too much. Edgar came away from the stove at once, already reaching through the air for him.

"Are you alright?" he said. "Are you hurt?"

Jimmy seemed stalled for a moment, and then - oh so deliberately - he tipped his chin up. Edgar stopped, scant steps away from him, at the sight of blooming purple hickeys. Jimmy's lips curled back from his teeth, his tongue skimmed his molars, and Edgar understood.

Edgar's hands fell to his side as fists. "Well," he said. "Whoever he was, he certainly handled you roughly."

Jimmy ran a hand over his throat, over the black marks, and said, "I like it rough."

Edgar couldn't look away. That black thing in his gut was stretching its claws, shredding his insides, and Jimmy just stood there, leaning smugly against the wall.

"You can have a piece of this too, Vargas," Jimmy said, toying with the curled hem of his hack-off crop top. "All you gotta do is take it."

"I don't want a _piece,"_ Edgar said, grimly.

"You don't, huh," Jimmy said. "Okay. Whatever. Well who needs you? I had a great time," he pronounced the words like the slow grind of a serrated knife. "I didn't even _know_ I could make noises like that."

"Really," Edgar said, through gritted teeth.

"Yeah," Jimmy said. His eyes glittered. "But you don't care about that, do you, Vargas? As long as a I had a good time? It doesn't matter to you who threw me over a dumpster and fucked me raw, huh?"

Edgar caught him by the throat, fingertips settling just over the ugly blossom of a stranger's bite. Jimmy made a surprised sound, eyes flying wide open.

 _"Did_ you have a good time?" Edgar said.

"-No," Jimmy said, teeth clicking together. "No I fucking didn't, as a matter of fact I spent the whole time thinking about this dick coworker of mine."

In the ache of hunger and heat that twisted Edgar's insides, he almost couldn't distinguish the feeling that stabbed through his throat. "Oh, Jimmy," Edgar said, "you don't want me. There are better men than me."

Jimmy closed his fist around Edgar's hand, holding it tight in place around his throat. "No there aren't," he said, glaring. "There's no better men, you stupid son of a bitch. There's only you."

[x]

When Jimmy lay finished at last, breathing hard into the edge of a pillow, Edgar got up and flicked the lights off. Abrupt night swallowed the room. He wasn't going to tell Jimmy to stay, but he hoped the gesture conveyed his reluctance to part ways. Anyways, Jimmy's room was a sad mess. Three months and he hadn't even put the fitted sheet down on his own mattress.

As he lay back down, in the shadows he could just see Jimmy's arm lift and fall back, opening up a place for him. The faint yellow lines of the filtered streetlight flashed against his forearm. Edgar slotted himself into it, unable to resist. It was so rare for another person to make him a place, rather than the other way around.

"This is a bad idea," Edgar said. He said it gently, a little sadly, running an absent thumb over Jimmy's clavicle. "You should think about what you really want."

"What's the fucking problem," Jimmy said, rolling his head over to fix Edgar with the full brunt of his exasperation. "You wanna be exclusive? I can deal with that."

Edgar stared at him for a moment, and then hid his face again, desperately. Jimmy let him go, the curl of his finger leaving a faint glowing memory against the underside of Edgar's chin. The skin of his shoulder was tacky with drying sweat, salt and human smelling, and Edgar closed his eyes against it.

"When I was your age," Edgar said, "I dated an older man. Well I don't know if _dating_ is the right word. He was married. He had a daughter, not much younger than me. I'd never been with a man before, he taught me a lot - I'm grateful for it, in a way - but it was- It wasn't good for me. I thought it would make me feel better, being with someone, being myself with someone. I honestly don't think I've ever felt lonelier than I did that year." His hand skated over Jimmy hip, coming to rest blindly above his heart. "I don't want to be that for you. Someone convenient. Someone you'll regret."

Jimmy let out a huff. "Are you tryina tell me you're married?"

Edgar muffled a laugh. "Mother of god, no."

Jimmy shifted, and his arm came up to close around Edgar's shoulder. It wasn't quite an easy hold - his fingers seemed to strain a little for purchase - but he was determined. Edgar tried to disentangle himself from the memory of that first lover, who had been a gentleman and handsome enough, but who had always made it clear that what they were doing was not love. A lot of the things he had taught Edgar had been how to troll for hookups and such, standards of the scene at the time, signs to look for. None of it had ever made Edgar feel an inch less lonely.

"I want better for you," Edgar said.

Before either of them could say anything else, the bedroom door swung open with a whisper of hinges. Edgar gave a start, against Jimmy's chest, as the shape in the doorway resolved itself into the shape of Nny, a hand hovering in front of him from when he'd pushed the door open.

"You're awake," Nny said.

"Oh," Edgar said, nervously, "Johnny, um."

He could feel Jimmy sucking in a breath, not letting it go, and for a moment they both balanced on the treacherous edge of the question - was this going to rupture things irreparably? Edgar couldn't help but think of the countless times Nny had bared his teeth at the whole concept of sex, damning anything remotely consequential to the flesh. There was never any telling what would set off one of his moods.

There was a tiny motion, as Nny switched his attention from Edgar to Jimmy. "Are you done?" he said, warily.

The held breath hissed out. "Yeah?" Jimmy said.

"Alright," Nny said, and came straight into the room, coat and boots and all, and climbed up on the foot of the bed. With the bedspread firmly between himself and the others, he wriggled into a little ball half curled over Edgar's stomach.

Edgar turned and fixed wide eyes on Jimmy, who was too busy looking down at Nny like a lovestruck idiot to contribute anything useful.

"I took a baseball bat from a guy on 8th street and blew out a streetlamp," Nny said, matter-of-factly. "I might have gotten a little electrocuted. I feel better."

"Oh," Edgar said weakly.

"You both can sleep," Nny said, flicking his fingers dismissively above himself. "I'll make sure nothing eats you."

Jimmy slumped back into his pillow, with a breath that sounded almost like a laugh. "I thought so," he said again, with that same grim smile.

"You thought _what?"_ Edgar said.

The covers under his hand were warm and heavy against the growing chill on his shoulders; the weight of Nny on his stomach was delicate and strange. Jimmy turned his head and flashed his teeth, eyes shining in the darkness. "The three of us," he said. "It was always gonna be the three of us."

Edgar looked between them helplessly, understanding and - still - afraid to understand. He supposed he had always known that Nny loved him. He supposed that he had loved Jimmy for a long time. The rest of it surged to fill the gaps like the ocean flooding into a lock, dark and heavy and alive.

"Living things stretch for the sun," Nny said, absently, "even in the oubliette, wherever the light is, all living things reach up for it."

Edgar swallowed that same hot stab in his throat, at last recognizing it for what it was. All of them were so busy trying to protect each other, striking out into the shadows without thinking twice, that without even seeing it happen they had built this fragile, byzantine nest all around themselves, a home that was more than a home. It had all grown so inevitably. Edgar wanted them to be better, both of them, he wanted to see them become something lovely and whole, something they could be proud of being. And both of them, somehow - for some reason - believed in... Edgar.

Stay with me, he had said to them. And they had stayed.

"Go to sleep," Nny said, patting his thigh absently. "I'll hold you down."

As Jimmy tiredly fiddled with his collar, unbuckling it and slinging it in the general direction of the bedside dresser, Edgar reached out and touched his cheek. Brittle hollow human softness, these two men he loved, all of their claws and scars and wild eyes.

"Okay," Edgar said. "Okay."


End file.
